LaRM day 70 (Cat's Eyes-Nick Cave)

Before we begin our Cave-a-thon we just have time to listen to the eponymous Cat's Eyes album from last year. A bloke from the Horrors and a female friend of his who does challenging operatic work sounds like a recipe for some kind of musical nightmare, but the Cat's Eyes album is fantastic. It's a murky, strange record which evokes a kind of retro mood but not to anything specific. It's kind of got a moody sixties vibe to it with understated strings and smoky atmosphere but I can't think of any records from the sixties that actually sounded like this. The songs are great, dark slices of noir-pop and their voices blend brilliantly in that well-worn Nancy & Lee kind of way. Another excellent demonstration of the commitment to old-fashioned record making is that they keep it under half an hour, so it's impossible for the album to start sounding gimmicky. There's only one mis-step (the overblown goth workout 'Sooner or Later') but otherwise it's really, really very good.

Right, let's get cracking with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds then. First up is From Her To Eternity (1984). Now bearing in mind I have real difficulty with the Birthday Party's records it should follow that Cave's early work with the Bad Seeds be just as tricky. It's not though, from the very start they made records that were leagues ahead of the Birthday Party, both in terms of the strength of the songs and in the stylistic execution of them. All the grimy atonal elements are present and correct but they're put to a much more effective use and all of the songs on From Her To Eternity are brilliantly brutal bits of endurance testing. It's really invigorating and the edge of collapse musicianship of the Bad Seeds is fantastically maintained. Second album, The Firstborn Is Dead (1985) ups the ante considerably and this is the first of Cave's albums to use a blistering, grandstanding song to open a record. 'Tupelo' also really sets out in one song most of Cave's thematic preoccupations: American pop culture, Biblical retribution and the blues. The music builds up to an apocalyptic storm as Cave relates an Old Testament style narrative and the whole thing is absolutely electrifying. The trouble with starting with something so massive is that following it up is tough but the whole of The Firstborn Is Dead is heart-stopping, it's alive with melodrama, both musically and lyrically and Cave really sets out his manifesto on it.

Strangely the next move was to make a covers album and Kicking Against the Pricks (1986) tends to be regarded as a particularly high point in Cave's career. I don't like it much. I don't really see the point of it, all of Cave's influences are pretty clear anyway and I don't really need him to do 'Black Betty' at all let alone in his frantic ramshackle way. I suppose it's interesting to see how he can turn all kinds of songs from all kinds of styles to his advantage by moulding them in his own image as it were, but on the whole the song choices themselves are so unsurprising as to render the album itself somewhat uninspiring. As I say, I think I'm entirely alone in this opinion. Cave's other album from 1986, Your Funeral...My Trial, I enjoy a lot more. It starts with a surprisingly sedate and considered opener in the title track. Obviously Cave's tales of murder, misery and damnation are of their usual flavour (and usual extremely high calibre), but the music on Your Funeral is more restrained and delicate than usual. 8-minute centrepiece to the album, 'The Carny' is fantastically creepy and unsettling and it's a sure sign that both Cave and the Bad Seeds were constantly refining their specific sound, making it tighter and tighter and more and more singular.

Tender Prey (1988) is easily the finest of Cave's earlier albums. It starts with the infamous 'The Mercy Seat', a frighteningly visceral first person tale of a condemned man's thoughts before going to the electric chair. Musically the approach is similar to 'Tupelo', gradually building up to a gut-wrenching slab of terrifying noise, but all done with intense control, and even more successfully. Interestingly the next song, 'Up Jumped the Devil' shows Cave's debt to Kurt Weill by way of Tom Waits, which is a natural fit but not one that I had really noticed before. The rest of the album is fantastically good throughout and it sets one brutal, mocking piece of noise against a delicate ballad ('Mercy' for instance, which is absolutely fantastic) in succession, never letting you settle or get comfortable with the record. It's a towering achievement and the signs that Cave is preparing to calm down a bit and focus on the structure of songwriting as much as the dramatic effect are starting to show. My copy has a bonus 12" which features Cave reading four extracts from his novel And the Ass Saw the Angel. Great though his lyrics are, I've never been convinced that he writes prose well and although interesting curiosity value the 12" doesn't add anything to the actual album.