Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - Murder Ballads
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CD Details
Artist: Nick Cave & the Bad SeedsEdition: Music CD
Format: Explicit Lyrics
CD Release Date: 1996-02-20
Music Label: Reprise / Wea
Soundtracks:
- Song of Joy
- Stagger Lee
- Henry Lee
- Lovely Creature
- Where the Wild Roses Grow
- Curse of Millhaven
- Kindness of Strangers
- Crow Jane
- O'Malley's Bar
- Death Is Not the End
Music reviews of Murder Ballads
Music Review: As a Joke, Not Too Funny
Rating: 1 Stars
As a great fan of much of Nick Cave's prior and subsequent music, it's hard to take this record very seriously... or to listen to it at all. I'm convinced it's nothing more than an intentional joke, full of rottenness, pomposity, and overwrought nihilism, with tongue planted firmly in cheek. "Murder Ballads" smacks of contractual obligation, and perhaps more. Was Cave grinding an axe with his record label while also trying to exorcise the past fan base by taking them on this sordid, self-effacing joyride? Might've been a laugh to make for that reason, but in the end it's simply not much fun for listeners, at least well-adjusted ones. If not intended as a joke, then listeners need to be genuinely concerned of what on earth was going through Cave's morose mind when he set about writing this darkened drivel. The opening track sets the overly dour mood for the whole project, with producer Tony Cohen choosing to place the listener deep within Cave's vile mouth in order to hear every lascivious lip smack and tongue click... much too close for any sort of comfortable listening. Throughout this ordeal, the album's vocal histrionics (those of Cave and his cast of ill-chosen female singers), affected torment, and overall lack of invention make for an unholy musical mess, not to mention an appalling caricature of Cave as the disaffected, self-amused "undertaker". Far from uplifting. Meanwhile, not at their best anyhow, the Bad Seeds' uninspired contributions are summarily swamped by Cave's over-the-top howling and yammering. It all gets mighty dull mighty fast, not to mention painfully predictable. As I drove down the road listening, I had an overwhelming urge to throw this disc out the window. But there's an unsolved murder in my town, and I'm afraid the killers might find it and listen to it, bringing further woe down upon the town's residents. A waste of Cave's considerable talent, and by far his worst.
Description of Murder Ballads
Nick Cave's been writing songs about killing and other evil things since he first surfaced in 1980 as the Birthday Party's pale, skinny, goth-punk Jim Morrison. But the murder ballads that provide this set's title are different, tantalizingly deliberate. Sure, there's plenty of trademark Cave here, but Murder Ballads is a fascinating concept album that uses the narrative ballad form of the English folk tradition to tell of murder: random deaths, passion crimes, and killing sprees, all in one package. Cave clearly thrives in this genre, and he produces some of his sharpest and most facile writing to date. "Song of Joy," a genuinely scary campfire mystery of a murdered family and an unnamed killer, chillingly weaves clues into the lyrics, while "Where the Wild Roses Grow" is a narrative duet in which killer (Cave) and victim (pop star Kylie Minogue) reveal parallel tales. Cave even shows his knack for adaptation on Bob Dylan's "Death Is Not the End": he recontextualizes a song of heavenly comfort into a sort of zombie "We Are the World" (featuring Minogue, PJ Harvey, Shane MacGowan, and others) in which "death is not the end" of pain and suffering. Above all, Murder Ballads should be heard as a work of pulp fiction--as sensationally funny as it is harrowing. The already violent traditional song "Stagger Lee" becomes gangsta folk, so ridiculously packed with obscenity and brutality it would make the Geto Boys cringe. And Cave's (unintentional?) point to would-be censors--that bad-ass songs existed long before rappers polluted the airways--should not be missed. --Roni SarigGeneral CDs
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