Nick Cave : Classic or Dud ?

:-)

I am glad to share a birthday with this man. I will listen to the Birthday Party all day.

Happy birthday!

Yes, that's right he's a Virgo/Libra cusp isn't he? I always kindof forget what sign Nick is for some reason. Happy Birthday Ivan!

Not really feeling his new album at all. Anyone?

me either, can't get past the first two songs. same reaction i had to grinderman...I love nick cave but, maybe like the fall, I've just kind of had enough

Yes, exactly.

I've had Straight to You on repeat all evening - it's an amazingly beautiful song. Not two things I normally associate with one another, beauty and Nick Cave

Classic but Dig Lazarus Dig hasn't appealed to me either.

Most of Lyre of Orpheus is beautiful imo

Dud. Birthday Party great, but after that I sometimes wonder whether he is responsible for Bad Things in music. PJ Harvey turned rubbish after she hung out with Cave, then he infected Will Oldham, and he also gave Kylie cancer.

All rather stagey for me and a friend who saw Grinderman recently came back spitting venom.

He is in some way responsible for the song Mr Cave's A Window Cleaner Now by Half Man Half Biscuit though, so I suppose we must put our bright swords up and let the good Lord calculate the final reckoning.

Your post really made me scared that the Nick Cave show I'm seeing on Monday night might not live up to my expectations but then I saw that you liked at least part of Will Oldham's career.

PJ Harvey turned rubbish after she hung out with Cave

Motherfucker you crazy. PJ has always been great, always will be. Put out her best album a year ago, in fact... in case you didn't notice.

reatards unite, don't fret, it will be great. i've seen nick a few times (though the last time was maybe 3 years ago) and he has never once been disappointing. MUCH better than when i saw will oldham, no doubt.

also lol @ the pinefox hating on the caveman.

Motherfucker you crazy. PJ has always been great, always will be. Put out her best album a year ago, in fact... in case you didn't notice.

I didn't like it, sadly, but I'm pretty sure that's my loss. My music tastes have got so narrow as to be the aural equivalent of an old man with dyspepsia picking at his food.

Nick Cave is one of those people who, because he gets close to the sort of thing I like, but doesn't quite hit the mark for me, gets my hackles up more than people I like less. Does that make sense? I'm not sure it does...

Will Oldham was dreadful the last time I saw him, I almost wept with boredom.

Christ - me, I, me, I, me, I. Shut up, man, who wants to know?

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds US Tour Dates

After seeing their most recent show, still classic. His relevance has outlasted all of his younger acolytes, including Gallon Drunk, The Flaming Stars (James Johnston has been a Bad Seed for the past 4 years), 16 Horsepower, Black Heart Procession...

Classic.

Nick Cave is the coolest man on the planet, next to Leonard Cohen.

I'm seeing Nick Cave tomorrow night here in NYC and I am psyched. I've missed him several times...but no more. I'm sure he's going to leave me stunned by greatness.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds US Tour Dates

Dear Nick,

Please come back to Austin, Texas. I miss you being here. If you come I will buy a ticket to your show, get drunk and sing along to "Stagger Lee" with you... and really, what could be better?

Cheers,
ilxor

i walked past warren ellis near madison square gardens a couple of hours ago, and it made me wish i'd be spending tonight watching him legkick and flail. report back, nyc-ers.

nick cave is the motherfuckin man, c'mon now

Best places to start? Live Seeds is incredible and can stand in for the entirety of his solo output to that point. The only album of Mr. Cave's I currently own or feel the need to own is the b-sides comp, which only has one stone dud on it and which - kind of - can stand in for the rest of his solo records.

nick cave is doing the music for a production of Woyzeck where i work. should be amazing. http://www.bam.org/view.aspx?pid=112

xpost pretty much everything he did in the 80's/early 90's is awesome. Since then, it's mostly been pretty good. I probably listen to the first half of Henry's Dream the most. Nick Cave's got that kind of Fall thing where you have to just dig in at random and start feeling your way out from wherever you are, and you feel like you have to get more and more and become familiar with lots of his stuff before you can understand any of it well. That Very Best of is actually a pretty dec introduction; it doesn't really work as an album, but it does a great job of sampling all the kinds of stuff they've done. Getting that and going from there would be as good a way as any to dig into them.

Anybody see the DC show(s)?

Mr. Monster & I were there on Monday!

I was there on Monday and thought it was a pretty badass show. I'd like to shake the hand of the man who yelled out for "Your Funeral My Trial," which killed.

How was Kid Congo?

Just read a few pages of Cave's new novel, The Death Of Bunny Munro:

Bunny stops thinking about Sabrina Cantrell's backside and starts thinking about her pussy instead and quite soon he is thinking about Avril Lavigne's vagina. He is almost positive that Avril Lavigne possesses the fucking Valhalla of all vaginas, and in response to this late-night lucubration he carefully folds a copy of the Daily Mail over his semi-tumescent memeber. There is, after all, a child in the room.

Is this book published yet?

Don't think so, but there's an extract in a magazine called Loops.

the fucking Valhalla of all vaginas

Oh dear. The porn mustache has finally taken its toll.

YOU'RE A OLD SLEAZY GUY NOW, WE GET IT, WELL DONE

And that quote actually makes it sound better than it is! It's pretty bad. It honestly reads like it was written by some smart-arse seventeen year old. Shit doesn't hit the fan, instead "the shit and the fan had their fateful assignation." You'd never guess he already has a previous novel and various screenplays under his belt. Avril Lavigne's vagina seems to be some sort of leitmotif:

A great wall of darkness moves towards him. It is unconsciousness and it is sleep. It moves like a vast tidal wave but before it breaks over him and he is away, before he renders himself completley to that oblivious sleep, he thinks, with a sudden, terrible, bottomless dread, of Avril Lavigne's vagina.

they dragged Avril & her vaginerrrr from the hole
and the bulb that burned above them
did shine both day and night
and the 'giner learned to love its greater darks and lesser lights

This stuff sounds pretty bad, folks. Surely he's capable of better.

this sounds great! what do you expect?

"Avril Lavigne" is very nearly an anagram of "Evil Vagina"!

nick cave's writing was almost always pretentious

Gotta risk pretentiousness and sentimentality to get anywhere deep.

That said, was that excerpted in Razzle?

Dig Lazarus Dig (album) overall is amusing and well written, and there are plenty of great songs on it. I really like it.

"Avril Lavigne" is very nearly an anagram of "Evil Vagina"!

actual LOLZ

Too bad "vagina" doesn't have two syllables or else you could sing it to the tune of "Evil Woman". That is, if you could do Jeff Lynne's falsetto.

i like grinderman and lazarus now. not sure what I was thinking a few years back. I even like nocturama now.

Yeah Bunny Munro was pretty terrible. Hard to believe it was written by the same person who wrote the wonderful And The Ass Saw The Angel.

i kind of like most of no more shall we part now as well. what is wrong with me. I'm still pretty sure bunny munro will not be any good though.

Actually I see things exactly opposite. "...And the Ass Saw the Angel" was a nice try but Nick clearly wasn't up to the task of writing a story in the O'Connor/Faulkner mode. That book ends up a pretentious mess.

"Bunny Munro" on the other hand was, to me, pretty funny in parts and much more relaxed. It didn't pretend to be great literature and the tone much in line with the louche demeanor put forth by Grinderman.

after spending a lot of time with all the post-boatman's call albums over the past month, it's pretty obvious to me now that abattoir blues/lyre of orpheus is a monumental masterpiece of a record, maybe better than boatman's call, rivaling the good son for my favorite overall record of his. I suppose a lot of people already knew this but for some reason I slept on this album for a long time, maybe because of the length, maybe also because even though I'd purchased it, the version I had on my ipod was cobbled together mp3s of different bitrates and mis-sequenced and it seemed more like a mess than it actually is.

Yes, it's fantastic. Probably my album of the year for 2004 and a hell of a masterpiece, his best work overall.