They have NICK CAVE polls now? I want one!: The ILM Nick Cave Poll Voting Thread (#106 in a series)

And The POLLS Ran Red Around Me / A Warm Arterial Spray

Poppa won't POLL you Henry

((jangle)) do you POLL me?

This is a POLL, and this is a gun

lol at all of this!

POLLIN doo dah doo, doo dah doo, doo dah do

omg hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah <3

:D

I'm NOT Going to Tell You About a POLL

If I may be obvious, The Boatman's POLL should be the title of something at least once in its life.

might as well go with A Box for Black POLL

Results in the frost, TuPOLLo's shame, TuPOLLo's shame

There She Goes, My Beautiful POLLL

But when I POLL into your arms
Everything, it comes tumbling down

Miley Cyrus floats in a swimming POLL

Your Funeral, My POLL

Okay I'm not gonna wait for another 25 posts for this :

The Name of the POLL Is a Thread Long-Suffering

Your Funeral, My POLL

tough to beat, imo

Stag said, “Well, just count the POLLS in the motherfucker’s head”

oooh thats good

Very inspired work re. results title suggestions.

As long as I can bang all this out by Christmas, I don’t mind extending voting for a couple more days.

So keep listening & sending in the ballots!

monstrous bass playing on so many of these Birthday Party tracks. always identified it as the nucleus of the band's sound, but kinda needed the reminder.

That bassist had funny habits, I always thought you felt the bass more than heard it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvlS4BwTUQw

that clip is positively amazing. love how Mick just stands there quietly offsetting everything.

that clip is the best. god i miss rowland and tracey.

would love it if there was a lot more visual stuff available.
Good that the Minneapolis set appeared. I think the band thought their US tour almost immediately prior to eventual implosion was their peak
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ljli8UR1-b0

Gotta love a band that goes out at its peak.

Still time to vote! Would be great to get a few more.

yes, my ballot is coming

Awesome!

Voted!

Appreciated !

sent

sorry to dip in last minute, but is there still time to submit something? i am a level B nick cave + pals fan, looking forward to the roll-out and it would be awesome to be rooting for a few faves in particular!

yes, I'm keeping it open for a bit. not because I'm super busy or anything, but so that everybody has a chance to submit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P23a2-L7Ixc

still working on mine, but will submit before i go to bed (1 to 3 hours from now)

voted!

going to bed!

Nice — thanks!

Still pretty loose on calling time on voting. Let’s say 24 hours from now ?

Also, question:

Should I split the votes for Do You Love Me & Do You Love Me (Part 2)? I think it was pretty clear in the end as to which version voters were preferencing in their ballots.

For the Neil Young poll they combined “Tonight’s the Night” and “Tonight’s the Night (Part 2)” fwiw. Maybe breakdown splits if you go that route?

actually, Tonight's the Night is a great point of reference. Think I'll combine 'em & as you say, spell out how the votes landed.

I love em both so I’m ok with combining!

could we have until Sunday to vote?

sent

I was actually hoping to start the rollout on either Friday or Sunday. the only reason being that things might get tight for me if we get too close to Christmas (it's going to be a quick roll out in any case).

Can you bang one out by Saturday morning, sarahell ?

And running after Xmas, nearer the height of ILX's EOY shenanigans, is... less than ideal. The voting period has been generously proportioned methinks. #UnsolicitedOpinions

Yeah - Saturday I can do -- thanks!

No problem!

So of course this means, you can all keep submitting till Saturday. and the rollout will be very shortly after that.

Well, I wasn't planning on sending a ballot as I'd say Nick's post-Birthday Party work is pretty minor in importance to me, but I was able to manage 20 songs barely, and probably included a lot more covers than most of you. As good as the BP were - if not quite a top ten post punk band overall, still possibly the very best of the really noisy side of art-damaged post punk - I find his self-important bellowing less intriguing without Roland and Tracey channeling his intentions into truly nasty intensity (which Nick only matched live). None of the bad seeds albums really hold up for me from start to finish apart from Kicking Against the Pricks, which is one of the all-time great covers albums, ranging as it does from sometimes headscratching song choices and production ideas that illuminate both the singer and the songs, to heartfelt tearjerker oldies like Long Black Veil and By The Time I Get to Phoenix that for my money accomplish better what he would seem to be trying to do with most of his hard to distinguish mopey underwritten droning ballads that make up seemingly 60% of his recorded output afterward.

So for me this is a Birthday Party poll (and you gotta vote for Shivers in there somewhere) with a bonus challenge of picking what you would keep from his later career. Don't get me wrong, it's a career that offers way more than the astonishingly lame diminishing returns of 95% of post punk bands past their 2nd or 3rd album; he's no Mark E. Smith or Talking Heads or Sonic Youth or Mekons or the Cure, but 20 songs I like is way more than, say, how many songs I like by later reformed Wire, reformed Gang of Four, post Swell-Maps Epic & Nikki, and post-Juju Banshees, all added up and combined. So he gets points for perseverance. And while I feel he has a lot of underwritten material and little quality control or ability to drastically vary his sound apart from occasionally wanting to get a raunchy rockin' sound without really bothering to have good riffs or a decent rhythm section that adds any interest, the bare bones of his compositions do sometimes make me marvel at some moments of sublime beauty I wouldn't expect from the weird looking caveman-poet dude from the birthday party. Moments that recall 1960s bacharach, like the ba-ba ba-ba vamping backing vocals from Slowly Goes the Night, or how the sliding steel that opens his beautifully unmannered and centered improvement CSNY's Helpless presages the riff from Fade Into You.

What's so interesting - it used to be frustrating, but you know you get older and your tolerance for boring music goes way up - is how what makes a good Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds track good is so utterly unlike the ecstatic pleasures of the vastly superior band where he got his start. When he found the groove in Swampland to integrate his shriek into like a squawking Dolphy solo, or just barely grips the octave up at the end of the chorus of She's Hit, he's an inspired singer employing the awkward instrument of his voice in the service of the demented dramatic situation he's trying to evoke. And he's finding all these interesting things to do with his voice and lyrics in songs that have such memorable grinding yet catchy Fall-like repetitive songs that then have the juddering bass and skronk turned up higher than the Fall seemed to even understand was possible. It reminds me a bit of how different the pleasures of New Order are from Joy Division, but you have an obvious reason for the difference there... Nick did sort of commit an artistic suicide or at least an amputation when he decided he needed to kill off or cut out his demented songbook of fantastic early triumphs, never to play any of them in his ensuing 37 years, and only to occasionally summon that sound in a lumbering tuneless echo in (my opinion) boring albums like Dig Lazarus Dig and Grinderman. One can imagine if he had not renamed the band, that he could grandly baffle an audience with a solo piano dirge rendition of King Ink, or sometimes close a show with a raveup revival of Hamlet Powpowpow that would have no reason for existing without the bass riff that seems to float over the skitting melee of the drums and vocal outbursts at seeming fisticuffs with each other. It's good that such things don't occur to him, they would be a travesty in a way. Or correct me if I'm wrong and he does play a few of those tunes... Jennifer's Veil would certainly be sturdy enough for him to 'cover'.

I think you're selling Roland and Tracy really short there, they weren't just "channeling his intentions" and that's why the name didn't continue and why his solo work is different. imo.