Now don’t get me wrong, I know Nick Cave. Dig, Lazarus Dig is one of my favorite albums of ALL-TIME. Thing is though, I’ve never ventured far from that album when it comes to his career sticking to his post DLD releases. I saw him live around the release of that album and was so pumped to hear songs from that album and the crowd dug them but they went INsane when he started playing older songs. I seemed to be missing something and vowed to catch up someday.
The time is now and I have done so by asking reddit how to proceed with this, as I do these days whenever I want to know anything at all. Fuck google you know? The narrative style is what I seem to be drawn to from him, I listened to the greek literary epic More News From Nowhere 20 times when I first came across it, though I also like the dismissive groove he resides in.
“Now Betty X is like Betty Y minus that fatal chromosome
Her hair is like the wine dark sea in which sailors come home”
More News From Nowhere
So people are telling me the tracks I should check out from his different albums as, while I like the idea of listening to everything an artist has done chronologically it is a huge slog. This method made getting into my now favorite band Bright Eyes more difficult than it needed to be, nearly impossible to get into David Bowie and what would you think of the Beatles if you had to do that before listening to them? Obviously it’s impossible to do so unless you wanted to conduct an experiment on your child but they’d come across as a low-fi cover band to the uninitiated.
Early on Do You Love Me (Part 2) is the first track that I’ve been recommended that was as brilliant as anything else I know from NC. The lyrics are typically genius and I don’t mean that as willingly as it sounds it actually is deserving of such an adjective but it is one that is often adorned by Cave, obscure histrionic and cerebral references everywhere, unusual yet vivid imagery and sensory inspiring descriptions. His delivery is what is tends to take tracks to the next level for me, where you hear him sing a line in such a way that you are struck by the nature of the mind that the option occured to.
“The walls of the ceiling are painted in blood
The lights go down, the red curtains come apart
The room is full of smoke and dialog I know by heart”
Do You Love Me (Part 2)
That track is from Let Love In. Elsewhere, The Curse of Milhaven from Murder Ballads is textbook brilliant but it is a little too creepy perhaps for regular listens.. Finally Rock of Gibraltar couldn’t be any more solid. I’ll keep you updated on my odyssey.
Rock of Gibraltar
