If someone asked me which is the most toxic album by Nick Cave, I would probably answer "Your Funeral... My Trial". The "Good" Nick had and will give further evidence of the exasperated destruction that invades him (see for example, "From Her To Eternity", or as a Debaserian noted, "Tender Pray") but in this album there is a sick and enclosed atmosphere, intimate as never before, as if there were no contacts with reality. Nick himself says: I dedicated myself to creating a mythological world in which to make my characters act and in which I could effectively live. It was a very conservative world in which good and evil never met. And, indeed, the album seems like the possible soundtrack for His only book, "And the Ass Saw the Angel," a heroin-addicted world where pain, domination, and ignorance exist... the album comes out in 1986-7, and the "Bad Seeds" are still the band that accompanies him... faithful, fantastic. To the essential contributions of Blixa Bargeld (he will also compose the song "She Fell Away") and Mick Harvey, increasingly the band's jack-of-all-trades, ready to do everything, pianist Thomas Wolf and American guitarist Kid "Congo" Powers are added. The songs on the album see a Cave very committed to honing the songs and lyrics, influenced by his listening, Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits above all, and here and there blues or folk (!!!) pop up and this, if we want, is the part I usually detest about Nick Cave. That vein that tends to America, to Bruce Springsteen & company. but fortunately, in this album, there's much more, also because every song has that fundamental stamp that keeps it away from the "slimy" and sweetened musicality, because His voice has a depth that reaches kilometers, so much so that you can hear and "see" an impressive abyss.
And then... Then there are some magical, fatal songs far from the light. I’m talking about "Strangers Than Kindness" and the title track "Your Funeral... My Trial": listening to them doesn’t bring typical sensations, but a mix between the unconscious and dark, sharp sides. In "Jack Shadow" the reference is to a prisoner in a maximum-security jail, and this is, in a certain sense, the condition that Cave lives, imprisoned among the demons of conscience and persecutory delusions, which will also lead him to play a prisoner in a film, and in the video of "The Mercy Seat". But the true apologia of reality, the total detachment from contacts and people, lives in "The Carny". The first sensation you have is that of having ended up in another dimension, in another time (if we can talk about time...) the music is halfway between a circus and a funeral service, and dark, icy tones color the scene. It seems like a theatrical scene, with little lighting. The song talks about a showman ("The Carny" indeed) taken from Cave’s Book, like other figures (the nagging "Sorrow") but what I'm most keen to express is the particularity of this song, its rhythm similar to that of a murderous and solitary waltz, amid cries of long-forgotten dreams... It will also be picked up by Wim Wenders, who will put it in "Wings of Desire" in a scene where a melancholic acrobat listens to it in her shabby trailer. I believe everyone should hear it at least once: it’s a bit like Venice, you have to go there at least once in your life! The album closes with "Scum"—a spit, the song starts and then a repeated and jaunty somewhat mean rhythm. Ultimately, this is the motive of the album: disdain and distance, spitting in "your best dishes," and the need to feel good, in this world...
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
01 Sad Waters (05:02)
Down the road I look and there runs Mary
Hair of gold and lips like cherries
We go down to the river where the willows weep
Take a naked root for a lovers seat
That rose out of the bitten soil
But sound to the ground by creeping ivy coils
O Mary you have seduced my soul
And I don't know right from wrong
Forever a hostage of your child's world
And then I ran my tin-cup heart along
The prison of her ribs
And with a toss of her curls
That little girl goes wading in
Rollin her dress up past her knee
Turning these waters into wine
Then she platted all the willow vines
Mary in the shallows laughing
Over where the carp dart
Spooked by the new shadows that she cast
Across these sad waters and across my heart
02 The Carny (08:02)
And no-one saw the carny go
And the weeks flew by
Until they moved on the show
Leaving his caravan behind
It was parked out on the south east ridge
And as the company crossed the bridge
With the first rain filling the bone-dry river bed
It shone, just so, upon the edge
Away, away, we're sad, they said
Dog-boy, atlas, half-man, the geeks, the hired hands
There was not one among them that did not cast an eye behind
In the hope that the carny would return to his own kind
And the carny had a horse, all skin and bone
A bow-backed nag, that he named "Sorrow"
How it is buried in a shallow grave
In the then parched meadow
And the dwarves were given the task of digging the ditch
And laying the nag's carcass in the ground
And boss Bellini, waving his smoking pistol around
saying "The nag is dead meat"
"We caint afford to carry dead weight"
The whole company standing about
Not making a sound
And turning to dwarves perched on the enclosure gate
The boss says "Bury this lump of crow bait"
And thean the rain came
Everybody running for their wagons
Tying all the canvas flaps down
The mangy cats crowling in ther cages
The bird-girl flapping and squawking around
The whole valley reeking of wet beast
Wet beast and rotten hay
Freak and brute creation
Packed up and on their way
The three dwarves peering from their wagon's hind
Moses says to Noah "We shoulda dugga deepa one"
Their grizzled faces like dying moons
Still dirty from the digging done
And as the company passed from the valley
Into a higher ground
The rain beat on the ridge and on the meadow
And on the mound
Until nothing was left, nothing at all
Except the body of Sorrow
That rose in time
To float upon the surface of the eaten soil
And a murder of crows did circle round
First one, then the others flapping blackly down
And the carny's van still sat upon the edge
Tilting slowly as the firm ground turned to sludge
And the rain it hammered down
And no-one saw the carny go
I say it's funny how things go
03 Your Funeral, My Trial (03:57)
I am a crooked man
And I've walked a crooked mile
Night, the shameless widow
Doffed her weeds, in a pile
The stars all winked at me
They shamed a child
Your funeral, my trial
A thousand Marys lured me
To feathered beds and fields of glover
Bird with crooked wing cast
It's wicked shadow over
A bauble moon did mock
And trinket stars did smile
Your funeral, my trial
Here I am, little lamb...
Let all the bells in whoredom ring
All the crooked bitches that she was
(Mongers of pain)
Saw the moon
Become a fang
Your funeral, my trial
04 Stranger Than Kindness (04:47)
Stranger than kindness
Bottled light from hotels
Spilling everything
Wet hand from the volcano
Sobers your skin
Stranger than Kindness
You caress yourself
And grind my soft cold bones below
Your map of desire
Burned in your flesh
Even a fool can come
A strange lit stair
And find a rope hanging there
Stranger than kindness
Keys rain like heaven's hair
There is no home there is no bread
We sit at the gate and scratch
The gaunt fruit of passion
Dies in the light
Stranger than kindness
Your sleeping hands journey
The loiter
Stranger than kindness
You hold me so carelessy close
Tell me I'm dirty
Stranger than kindness
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Other reviews
By Saleppe
The album captures a haunting blend of raw emotion and poetic darkness.
Your Funeral... My Trial stands as a powerful testament to Nick Cave's storytelling and musical vision.