Nick Cave is almost respectable these days – a glowering Australian icon whose career with the Bad Seeds, along with impressive film and book-writing sidelines, have made him a comfortable king in the alternative rock pantheon. But he started out raw and hungry. Cave's earliest works with his band the Bad Seeds have just been reissued as part of a sweeping campaign by Mute Records.
Each of Cave and the Seeds' albums will eventually be reissued with digitally remastered sound and also in spiffy two-disc Collector's Editions with 5.1 surround sound, liner notes, a short documentary and rare b-sides. Their first album, 1984's From Her To Eternity, kicks off the campaign.
The Bad Seeds were born in the aftermath of Cave's first band, the fiercely post-punk Birthday Party. The fledgling Cave and Bad Seeds style, a demented reinvention of the blues, set the template for alternative rock blues later carried on by acts like the White Stripes and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, but Cave's lyrics were starting to enter a world all of their own. It proved rich with metaphor and imagery, steeped in the intoxicating allure of the American Deep South that Cave was so drawn to.
The band eases in with a slow-boiling oddball cover of Leonard Cohen's "Avalanche," but when the herky-jerky "Cabin Fever" starts, you're entering Cave's world of visceral angst. When the bluesy harmonica eases in with "Well of Misery" it's like a blast of cool air. The throbbing heart of the album is "Saint Huck," Cave's Mark Twain meets Charles Bukowski nightmare ride through the myths of the American South, wrapping in Huck Finn, "The Odyssey" and Elvis. In its howling, clattering beat you get a vision of where Cave is trying to go – "This is the track of deception / Leads to the heart of despair," he growls.
Article comments