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Year 1982. After the punk wave, the talent of the "Birthday Party" emerges like a stab in the stomach, the group led by the "good" Nick Cave, who, despite being a novice, demonstrates more expressiveness than anyone else throughout the 1980s. Alongside Cave, we find Mick Harvey, his lifelong musical "partner," Ron Howard on guitar, Phil Calvert on drums, and the legendary Tracy Pew on bass, a character with a forbidden alcohol level sporting a cowboy hat.
But 1982 is the year the Birthday Party disbands, after the albums Junkieard and Prayers on Fire. The period is full of misunderstandings, and the characters that compose the band take different paths.
But before this happens, they leave us with two wonderful EPs, collected in '89 on a single album: Mutiny\The Bad Seed which bring back all the malice and self-destruction of the period. The album is nervous, full of fears and dark sides, screams. A Nick Cave who will calm the voice when, after two years, he embarks on a solo career, tinging his music with blues. But everything you hear in Mutiny! The Bad Seed is heartbreaking, almost off the beat that the music demands: starting from the first song "Sonny's Burning" where the asynchrony and distortion of the voice are frightening and the guitar seems to drive the tempo: a neurotic, obsessed song while in "Wild World" calm returns, that calm often found in Nick Cave's songs, like a drunk walking down a wet road at night, swaying caught in dreams. Even in the subsequent songs ("Fears of Gun"), the voice screams desperate, and the guitar strongly reminds the sound of Blixa Bargeld, guitarist of Einstuerzende Neubauten and future Bad Seed, while in "Deep In The Woods" there is the impression of a procession progressing slowly, very slowly ("Deep in the woods a funeral advances slowly"
) and the slow and rhythmic tolling seems almost like a death knell announcing something inevitable, to which it is impossible to remedy. In the second part, Ron Howard's contributions are felt in "Jennifer's Veil" in "Say A Spell". It would seem like a calmer and more listenable part, but then just wait for the finale, and suddenly the black and cold vortex in which Cave and company lived returns. "Swampland" is nasty, vomitous, abrasive, acidic, shouted, and even in the last two songs, there is the impression, first ("Pleasure Avalanche") of a slow and infernal crescendo, full of suffering and twisted grunts, and even in the last Mutiny In Heaven (which opens with the chirp of what sounds like a skinned cat) the rhythm increases, and you hear different voices under a repetitive rhythm that leaves little else around...
A fundamental record if on some evenings you feel prey to dark pain, or certain delusions and want to break everything around you; a record that performs a catharsis on sadness, but that not everyone will manage to listen to: one of the most violent and impressionistic records of Nick Cave.
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