Cave swaggers through these tunes like a Goth Iggy Pop. He frequently sounds like a man possessed, overwhelmed by his passions, gibbering and moaning away as the songs tend to careen about him. There's little humor in this dark album, unlike some of Cave's later work. While not as polished as Cave and the Seeds would eventually become, with their distinctive melodramatic mix of darkness and heartbreak, From Her To Eternity is still a valuable landmark in their evolution.
The DVD on the Collector's Edition includes a documentary looking at the demise of the Birthday Party and start of the Bad Seeds. It is packed with information, including a song-by-song analysis, but a bit heavy on the talking heads and lacking in Cave himself (annoyingly, though, the documentary fails to identity the speakers easily). There are also bonus tracks of "In The Ghetto" and "The Moon Is In The Gutter," and an alternative version of the song "From Her To Eternity."
Cave's cover of Elvis Presley's "In The Ghetto" is marvelous, brooding and punk rock in the best sense, but also reverent to the original. The included video is equally great, an impossibly young Cave in his tuxedo with Flock Of Seagulls hair, doing his best Elvis the Pelvis with an utterly straight face. With "In The Ghetto," you see Cave angling to become a kind of dark prince of crooners, a negative-image version of Elvis who sings of shadows and legends. While the young Cave might not have imagined it, he turned into just that man.
Article comments