Read More: Nick Cave Will Never Be Forgotten: An Interview with Nick Cave
Black suit wearers and dark crooner aficionados of all stripes can argue till the bats come home about which Nick Cave album is best to start with. I won't argue it doesn't matter, everything does now, but don't lose focus on the main thing: You're about to become a Nick Cave fan! This is so exciting. I feel like we're practicing kissing on red velvet pillows in a room with more shades than windows.You're about to become a Nick Cave fan! This is so exciting. I feel like we're practicing kissing on red velvet pillows in a room with more shades than windows.
So you want to get into: Early Nick Cave?
Terrifying and hilarious, The Birthday Party fused rockabilly and pure spasm. In songs like "Mutiny in Heaven" and "Zoo Music Girl" intravenous drug use and sex are portrayed as glorious self-flagellation. Nick Cave was setting a career template of bodies colliding through a romantic space, where the divine and the infernal sweat together. The time signatures were complicated, the drums pummeling, and songs started with lyrics like, "Hands up, who wants to die!" It was rarely a question. I understand there's a "thing" against "Best of" albums but Birthday Party "Hits" gives a fine overview of a band that influenced, well, Jesus Lizard, Celebration, and a bunch of 90s noise rock bands that I'll never convince you to care about. They should have influenced more bands but people aren't great and most often when a band sites Birthday Party as an influence it just means they have a drug problem, are going to hit on your girlfriend when you're not in the room, and can't be fucked to write a chorus to save their short lives.Get ready to unquit smoking.
So you want to get into: Death Nick Cave?
Cave's 1990 album, The Good Son, with its homicidal, maybe Cain and Abel themed, title track, is few people's favorite in his catalog. It's far more subdued than the records that came before and the production arguably omits the grit of those while lacking the mastering fullness of Cave's early 90s work, when he was strangely embraced by the same alternative culture that was bopping along to Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins. The Good Son is my favorite Bad Seeds record, partially because it's the first Nick Cave album I bought, at the Berkshire Mall when I was 15, and I hated it because it didn't sound like Nitzer Ebb but I'd spent eight dollars on it and I swore to listen to it until it made sense. This is as good a time as any to strongly plea that anyone who's interested in Nick Cave not give up after just a listen or two. We're talking about hypersexualized Old Testament as performed by an Elton John in, depending on the period, half or twice the amount of snakeskin. Sit with it for a bit.This is as good a time as any to strongly plea that anyone who's interested in Nick Cave not give up after just a listen or two. We're talking about hypersexualized Old Testament as performed by an Elton John in, depending on the period, half or twice the amount of snakeskin. Sit with it for a bit.
So you want to get into: Lovely Nick Cave?
While "Into My Arms" and "Straight To You" are the two go-to first dances, there's a lot to be said for mid-tempo stomps like "There She Goes, My Beautiful World," where gospel singers and barrelhouse piano join forces with references to Karl Marx and Jonny Thunders to woo as unsubtly as possible. (It's likely that in this case, the "world" Cave refers to is not a metaphor but rather the song is a love song to the actual earth. But we are not small minded here. Kiss that planet, young libertines.) On the same album, Abattoir Blues/Lyre of Orpheus, which over the course of two records can occasionally feel a tad boogie-era Stones (perhaps because it was the first Bad Seeds album without Blixa), "Supernaturally" is an endearingly odd song of desire that won't work at a wedding, but sometimes you need to love someone in a car.It's tempting to call all of Nick Cave's love songs unsubtle but I'd be hard pressed to think of a truly affecting love song that isn't. If it's a love that makes you want to do anything other than set your arm on fire, maybe it's not love your feeling but an impulse to donate to NPR. That's also very worthy but if it's love, let the man sing. "The Ship Song" with its refrain of "come sail your ships around me/and burn your bridges down/we make a little history, baby/ every time you come around/come loose your dogs upon me…" is love song as contract between lovers who put on their good shoes to go to 7-11, and it's sung accordingly. Wouldn't it be wonderful to get out of these endless sweatpants for a day or lifetime?It's not easy to find that many of his songs that document true love without a trace of homicide drifting by to borrow some sugar.
So you want to get into: Nick Cave Songs About Jesus, Getting Fucked Up, And One Song About Music Critics?
If you believe in a God of sorts but punishment or non-intervention feel the most real, it's not unreasonable to get very fucked up. From his little known cover of "Rye Whiskey" (first available as a flexi-disk insert in Reflex Magazine) to the bar jukebox standard rager, "Brother My Cup Is Empty," Nick Cave sings about hard liquor fueled oblivion like it's a vocation. Sometimes the intoxication comes from within, as on the 14-minute journey through delirium that is "Babe, I'm On Fire," where every single band member, crew, extended family of man is name checked and their love hysteria both evoked and duly noted.Cave's frisky side project, Grinderman (with Warren Ellis, Jim Sclavunos, and Martyn P. Casey) is more about being wasted, on multiple levels, than overt drinking. Grinderman is a loose and noisy, existing to revisit some of the hard blues templates of The Bad Seeds' eighties work (First Born Is Dead and the "Kicking Against The Pricks" covers album in particular) while indulging in more experimental sonics that didn't have a place in what the Bad Seeds were doing at the time (though the tension has been resolved with the textural broadening out and soundscaping of both Push The Sky Away and Skeleton Tree). "Indulge" being the key word, as, on "No Pussy Blues" and "When My Baby Comes," the band seems intent on fucking their way out of whatever trouble they've gotten themselves into.No scholarly (attempt at) summation of the Nick Cave oeuvre would be complete without "Scum," the best song about music criticism ever written. Written about NME music writer, Matt Snow, who had the temerity to call a Bad Seeds album "disappointing." Over a staggering rhythm, Cave menaces the writer, calling him a "fuckin traitor, chronic masturbator, shitlicker, user, self-abuser…" and, perhaps worst of all, "the epitome of their type." In true Nick Cave fashion, the song starts with him spitting and ends with murder and an almost lovely image of the dead snow under a blue sky.Playlist: "Wide Lovely Eyes" / "Brother My Cup Is Empty" / "No Pussy Blues" / "Black Betty" / "Rye Whisky" / "Jesus Alone" / "When My Baby Comes" / "Baby, I'm On Fire" / "Scum" Zachary Lipez is the only person who could've written this. Follow him on Twitter.Many of the characters in Nick Cave's songs, like the murderer in "Up Jumped The Devil," are surer of the opposition to God than any chance of redemption, but none seem to believe in the Devil in isolation.