Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - From Her To Eternity and The Firstborn Is Dead
Mute/EMI
By Andrew P Street
In 1983 The Birthday Party disintegrated in
a haze of creative disagreements and heavy drug use in their adopted
home of London. Frontman Nick Cave wasted little time in getting a new all-star group
together, retaining drummer/right-hand man Mick Harvey and late-period
guitarist Hugo Race and recruiting Magazine's bassist Barry Adamson and Einstürzende Neubauten guitarist Blixa Bargeld for a band briefly
called The Cave Men but swiftly renamed The Bad Seeds. Within months they'd completed their first album.
From Her to Eternity is still a striking recording, sounding
distinctly not of its time thanks to the warped arrangements and magnificently
haphazard production. The songs are also remarkable: untethered from the
strictures of a permanent band, Cave was able to give his muse free rein. His version of Leonard Cohen's 'Avalanche' is chilling (and what sort of message is a writer as
idiosyncratic as Cave sending by starting the first record under his own name
with a cover version?),
contrasting with the demented, Weill-influenced sea-shanty 'Cabin Fever' and the
call-and-response chain-gang worksong 'Well of Misery'. Then there's the classic
"I wanna tell you about a girl..." intro to the still-classic title track, while the
epic 'Saint Huck' mixes Biblical allegory and American mythology into a heady brew –
one that Cave would draw deeply from for the next album – and could the elegiac closing track 'A Box for Black
Paul' be a funeral hymn to the old band?
The Firstborn Is Dead is more sparse than its predecessor (due in part to the departure of Race) and takes Cave's obsession
with America and the blues even further, from the Elvis-as-Christ metaphor of the
opening 'Tupelo' to the namechecked US towns of 'Wanted Man' and the skeletal
blues of 'Say Goodbye to the Little Girltree'. It's not
quite as stunning an album as its predecessor, although it sets down templates for much
of what's to come: without 'Tupelo' there'd be none of the slow-building madness
that spawned 'The Mercy Seat', the driving shuffle of 'Train Long Suffering' sets the scene for
'I Had a Dream, Joe', and the slinky 'Black Crow King' is the first appearance
of the diseased loverman strut of 'Red Right Hand' and 'Do You Love Me?'
These reissues comes as double packs: disc
one is a CD (based on the original vinyl versions of the albums), disc 2 is a DVD with a documentary on each album, featuring interviews with
just about everyone connected with the recordings (bar Cave) plus fans, fellow
musicians and critics, as well as videos and the bonus tracks from the original
CD versions of the albums, like Firstborn's 'The Six Strings that Drew Blood' and Eternity's 'In the Ghetto'. As records, they're superb – but as artefacts of
the artistic development of arguably the finest songwriter to come out of Australia,
these are vital, powerful documents.
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