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April 08, 2008

DIG, LAZARUS, DIG!!

There are few artists working in any medium whom I revere as much as Nick Cave. I admit I got into him late in the game, but I've been devouring everything he's done. I think of him like other late discoveries: Richard Yates, Francois Truffaut, John Milton, Randy Newman, Leonard Cohen, Milan Kundera, Wallace Stevens - all have expansive bodies of work that I am still skimming the surface of.

While you'll probably need to read the ridiculously expansive series of articles about him on the Wikipedia, I'll summarize as briefly as I can. Cave started out as an Aussie Punker with the noise band Birthday Party. Their albums are dissonant, kind of awesome, and ultimately unlistenable. While I like a few of their tracks (like "Zoo Music Girl"), I mostly turn it on when I need to fill the room with sound, which is rarely.

In 1984, and seriously on the smack, Cave disbanded The Birthday Party and formed the Bad Seeds. There are very few permanent member of the Seeds, but for Birthday Party-er Mick Harvey has been with Cave since the 70s. In '93, a move I think is pivotal, the Dirty Three's Warren Ellis signed on to be a member.

I think that a lot of serious Bad Seed fans will disagree with me, but I greatly prefer the more mellow, meditative, lyrical, gloriously pretentious, and brutally honest pairings with Ellis to the rougher, harder work that preceded it. Ellis is a weird genius - he and Cave recently composed the (awesome) score for that Brad Pitt JESSE JAMES movie. My favorite album of the Ellis-inspired Seeds (and one of my favorite albums ever) is one a lot of Cave nuts disparage, the transcendent spiritual question mark of a concept album, THE BOATMAN'S CALL.

Here is that album's powerful, prosaic, and weighty opening track, "Into My Arms."

Cave is many things: grime poet, allusionist, anachronistic troubadour badass, Aussie punk rocker obsessed with aborigines, novelist, screenwriter (he wrote the unusually grim and violent Revisionist Western THE PROPOSITION), blues freako, unapologetic misogynist, lovelorn contemplative, and street philosopher. He's the bastard child of Abelard and Dusty Springfield. He's impossible to pin down: 1996's MURDER BALLADS is as gruesome, unforgiving, and realistic as 2004's THE LYRE OF ORPHEUS is ambiguous, optimistic, and poetic.

This video of "Breathless" from ORPHEUS is a perfect example of how hard it is to pigeonhole Cave.

After ORPHEUS, the Bad Seeds took a four year hiatus. In the meantime, Cave, Ellis and two of the Bad Seeds strangely started their own side project: Grinderman and their self-titled album. I'm glad they did, because its more rocking than ORPHEUS and 2003's NOCTURAMA, and 2001's NO MORE SHALL WE PART. It featured one of my favorite songs of 2007, "Go Tell The Women."

This week brings his latest, DIG LAZARUS DIG! It's pretty great. This review from the AV Club sums up most of my feeling. I like the way he is described as having a "friction between muck and majesty" (but disagree that this album doesn't have a little of that, even without the piano.) Some of the songs on DIG have Cave's patented brilliance - "We Call Upon The Author," in particular, is typically informed with literary references and bawdy humor. And while it continues in the Grinderman vein of rockin' more than pontificatin', it still manages enough profundity to satisfy the pretentious part of me that thinks music is supposed to, you know, mean something.

With that, here's the title track:

| By Andytown | 08:32 PM

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Posted by: Harvey at April 9, 2008 09:27 AM

Posted by: bethan at April 9, 2008 09:44 AM

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