Nick Cave : Classic or Dud ?

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.

It is probably crazy how much better I like "From Her to Eternity" on the Wings of Desire soundtrack v. "From Her to Eternity" on the album of that name. It's just razor sharp, man.

very much seconded. I discovered the song through that movie and was appalled when I heard the tinny original.

Totally otm. Movie version so much richer, much more dramatic. I always skip the original bc I hate the way it sounds.

When they're first committed to tape, lot of Bad Seeds numbers (in contrast to Nick Cave songs) seem to be a groove with a chord change and a monologue on top. It's later on that the noise and improv gets solidified into a song. The Live Seeds versions of his early 90s stuff is a lot more compelling too. "Tupelo" and "Mercy Seat" seem to be lucky situations where the total fire was there at the start.

yeah i'm not usually a fan of live albums but most versions on Live Seed kill the originals

Oops:

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/12/08/article-0-0C65AD15000005DC-492_634x415.jpg

Though I do love this:

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/12/08/article-0-0C65ADAF000005DC-582_634x647.jpg

wtf is that jacket

(his I mean)

What's with all these Australians suddenly trying to bring back western civilization? First Assange, now this...

er, not back, down :-/

Love the comment:

Never heard of him but now I'm a big fan.

just discovered murder ballads. wow!

stagger lee is mindblowing. this is where cave laid the groundwork for the grinderman project, no?

stagger lee blows the rest of that album out of the water, which is saying a lot since it's packed with gems. love the video for it as well. it's basically just the band standing around, but NC and BB just have so much damn presence.

it reminds me of worm tamer from grinderman 2.

this is where cave laid the groundwork for the grinderman project, no?

no

yeah, i've now read the sound/vibe for grinderman goes back as far as cave's early band (the birthday-party, iirc?). i wasn't a fan years ago, when i heard that stuff. maybe it's time for another try, since i love grinderman 2 so much.

http://www.watfordobserver.co.uk/news/9530466.Julie_named_Alumnus_of_the_Year/

awesome

bring back the handlebar mustache tho

"Well of Misery", Electric Ballroom, 1984 - billed as Nick Cave & The Cavemen

fkn great performance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFdUTM4gU-o

lol@ spanish subtitles

goddammit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26zga0G_C4A

one more

St Huck, Barcelona 1984

melt ur face

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcnUvZqvBiI

He was fantastic once.