Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Masked and breathing., October 25, 2000
Once I read an interview with Leonard Cohen, and he was talking - very wisely, as usual - on how Cave ate, digested and spitted out in his own way Cohen's song "Avalanche" (in Cave's "From her to eternity"). Well, yes, this is a cover album, but in its way it is profoundly a Cave's album. Cave is a great lyricist and musician, but he is also an interpreter of first class, because he manage to make other people's song in his own very peculiar sound. Some reviewers wrote that here Cave chose his favourite artists. I don't think it's completely true: I would rather say that he chose his peculiar themes, the same that we find in his own compositions - digging and burying, killing without a reason or for jealousy or beauty or love's sake, corpses that come up from the grave despite the rules of death, the power of natural elements and especially water as an image of time and changing (also epistemologically) as well as of the deepest and murkiest regions of the mind, breaking the law and death penalty, judging and killing and leaving... The quality of the songs is very good, but I think what really makes this album great is its inner thematic coherence, as different steps in a very contorted but eriching path Cave has been following since the very beginning of his career. Follow him, you might agree or disagree with him, but as every good artist he is always showing you the same things from new and more revealing points of view.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best Interpretation of "Standards" In Any Genre, February 4, 2006
And, strangely, best Nick Cave album of all, considering his catalog of excellent and provocative original material (most of which you should buy, especially the stuff from around this time, like _From Her to Eternity_ and _First Born Is Dead_). I'm sure there is no other album out there whose title can be said to reference both a book of short stories by Samuel Beckett (to go with Cave's minimalistic tendencies) and the New Testament (to amplify his obsession with retribution and other biblical topics). Perfect company. The emotion he wrings out of these old and largely obscure songs is well-nigh unparalleled in the history of recorded music. Several of these are country songs by the likes of Johnny Cash and Earl Campbell, feeding beautifilly into Cave's Southern Gothic kick at the time. Then you have the heroin chic of VU's "All Tomorrow Parties" turned cowboy with yells and whips. Then there's gospel (sung rousingly in barbershop quartet style on "Jesus Met the Woman at the Well"--you'd swear you're at a tent revival). And then classic rock in the guise of a foot-stomping version of . . . Ram Jam's "Black Betty"? I'll just say that what the original possesses in Queen-like pastiche and excess, the cover compensates for in field holler mania. All of this is made all-the-more poignant by the very basic recording values at play here. The Bad Seeds thrive with a lead man on the edge between maudlin and mad; they play off him perfectly, making the bare-bones recording jump out at you with the virtue of frantic and impassioned playing alone. The only other place where you will hear such a range of emotion evinced from two or three chords is on a record of Lightnin' Hopkins or Leadbelly originals, making this one of the most visceral listening experiences you will ever encounter. Especially noteworthy is the extremely "out there" version of Jimi Hendrix's "Hey Joe," where Cave pounds the piano within an inch of the hammers' lives.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Nick stripped., June 6, 2000
Albums of covers are usually best to be avoided, but Nick Cave's Kicking Against the Pricks is that exception. It's not his best album but for Nick Cave fans it's a sentimental favourite. His individual takes on rock, folk and gospal music may not exceed the originals, but his interpretations are usually right on the money. His cover of Johnny Cash's tale of a nomadic musician in The Folk Singer, his take on rock classics like Alex Harvey Band's Hammer Song and The Velvet Underground's All Tomorrows Parties, are all fantastic. But his version of Roy Orbison's Running Scared which builds from nothing into a soaring crescendo really takes the cake. It's a damn fine little record.
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by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds 
