Customer Reviews

Murder Ballads

5 star:		(42)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I bought this CD after reading some of the reviews and I must say its some of the most downright chilling music I've ever heard. It isn't the lyrics, you can hear songs equally violent listening to rap. Its all in the musical arrangements and Cave's sinister vocal style. That combustible combination makes Murder Ballads a vicious yet delicious masterpiece.
Stagger Lee is simply stunning. I have heard old versions and they don't come close to what Cave has done after he adds his touch.
Where the Wild Roses Grow is a hauntingly beautiful and strikingly sordid song that reminds me of one of Joyce Carol Oates' early macabre short stories. Kylie Minogue's angelic vocals as victim are in sharp contrast to the evil that emanates from Cave's.
My favorite is the epic O'Malley's Bar, a tale of a man gone mad who ruthlessly and brutally murders everyone in his neighborhood bar but shrinks at the end from taking his own life. Appalling violence marks this fourteen minute saga from start to finish.
Songs of murder and violent death have been around since the days of antiquity, but here Nick Cave masterfully takes the genre to a new level. If you enjoy mystery, horror, a well-written and well-told tale, aren't too squeamish and are open to something unusual, then I highly recommend that you buy Murder Ballads. You won't be sorry.

I have discovered that "Murder Ballads" is a great CD for the lovelorn. Several years ago, my five-year relationship with "the boy of my dreams" ended. Months later, I was still in a very dark place. I had always been an off-again, on-again Nick Cave fan, and didn't own every album. I was DJ-ing at the time, and someone gave me a promotional copy of "Murder Ballads."

Within weeks, it had become the soundtrack to my world. It was vicious, it was grim, it was hysterically funny. It was like the script of "Pulp Fiction," "Reservoir Dogs" or "Jackie Brown" as told through English folksong or Appalachian mountain tale.

I giggled with horrified glee as a loving family man and good doctor murdered his family with cold calculation on "Song of Joy." I guffawed as openly gay criminal Stagger Lee threw over expectant hooker Nellie Bound, to molest and murder her manly boyfriend. I cheered as Crow Jane efficiently gunned down the 20 miners who raped her, and laughed as a lovelorn boy was led astray by the beautiful ghost ("Lovely Creature") of a girl long since dead. I smirked and sighed at the overwrought tearstained drama of "Kindness of Strangers" and "Where the Wild Roses Grow." I loved the Nick and P.J. (Harvey) duet, "Henry Lee." I think we'd known for a long time that P.J. was Nick's perfect foil, and letting her play murderous mistress to Nick's faithless lover was perfect musical casting.

Finally, we were given the opportunity to hear Nick go postal on the local patrons of "O'Malley's Bar," and the local suburbanites of the town of Millhaven, in which Nick casts himself as a golden-ringleted, psychopathic fourteen year old girl.

And you know what? All that snickering made me feel much better. And I learned to love Nick Cave and his bombastic albums like "Murder Ballads," "Let Love In," "Henry's Dream," and parts of "Tender Prey." I loved his soulful/bluesy albums, like "The Firstborn is Dead," and "Your Funeral, My Trial." And I learned to love his other 'concept' album, "Kicking Against the Pricks" (all covers, all fabulous) almost as much, if not moreso, than "Murder Ballads." Hearing Nick and the boys outdo Tom Jones' oversexed delivery of "Sleeping Annaleah," Nick's truly sorrowful version of Johnny Cash's "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," and earnest cover of "Long Black Veil," in addition to other humorous, haunting, harrowing covers of various standards is definitely worth your money.

In truth, every Nick Cave album is a concept album--love, death, murder, rebirth, confession, obsession, revenge. It might take a brave soul, but everybody's got one hidden somewhere.

Similar to almost any other Australian music-lover, I'd heard "Where The Wild Roses Grow" countless times before I decided to buy this album. Indeed, my actual purchase may have been as a sort of "NOW, will you stop playing this song?" reaction. Regardless, this CD is simultaneously the most terrifying one I have ever listened to from start to finish and also the most amazing idea I have ever seen committed to CD.

The title says it all, Cave and his Bad Seeds have taken the age-old murder ballad and had their wicked way with it and would now like you to hear the fruits of their labour. Not all of these songs are old murder ballads, and those which are tend to be present with slight alterations or in lesser-known forms, but they all would not sound out of place at any time in history. The reason being that they deal with topics such as cold-blooded murder, obsessive passion and crazed hatred which are not alien to any culture.

The opener, "Song Of Joy", is full of typical Cave irony. The title refers to the wife of the singer - killed in a particularly brutal fashion, as the song reveals. Of course, the idea of naming such an unrepentantly nasty song "Song Of Joy" is only what we have come to expect from this tortured genius. Cave's wit surfaces with such moments as the description of the wife becoming sad and "Joy in name only". As the song goes on, Cave weaves in a reference to Milton's "Paradise Lost" (interestingly enough, the same section which gave him the title of an earlier song) and gives some very tantalising clues to the killer's identity. A word of warning, listening to this song at night as not overly recommended, the atmospheric nature of gloom is more than all-pervading.

"Stagger Lee" and "Henry Lee" are both old ballads, and routinely listed as some of the best murder ballads of all time. "Stagger Lee" is performed in a rarer version which makes the (anti-)hero significantly less repentant. For some reason, this actually makes Stag somewhat more appealing as a subject. "Henry Lee" is a duet with PJ Harvey, in which the traditional murder ballad roles are reversed. This time, it's the man - a terribly flaky character as portrayed by Cave - who gets done in by Harvey, again, the listener finds themselves cheering the killer.

"Lovely Creature" and "Wild Roses" both deal with crimes of passion. "Lovely Creature"s pace - significantly faster than the songs around it - makes it a standout, as does the lyric which does not explicitly state that murder occurred. Indeed, the lyric reveals a depth of passion which is somewhat odd considering that the indication is that the murderer and victim have only just met. The ethereal, wordless female vocals backing Cave add immeasurably to the effect - as Cave paints a picture of a killer who may not quite be on the right side of sanity. "Wild Roses" covers much of the same ground, and could almost serve as a dual-narrative version of "Lovely Creature" were it not for the time factor. Kylie Minogue's voice provides a sharp foil of innocence against which Cave's voice - in a masterful performance - relays its clear-minded insanity. The song is especially poignant considering the romance between the singers which existed at the time - the lyrics reveal considerable passion on both sides, but yet there is an air of inevitability about the death. One particularly arch touch is Minogue's revelation in her verse that Cave's parting words of "All beauty must die" became merely "a muttered word".

Then comes the section of the album where Cave loosens up - if such a description could ever be applied. "The Curse Of Millhaven" is hilarious in the most perverse sense of the word. Cave portrays a young woman in a small town where a whole series of gruesome deaths just keep happening, and over a very rapidly-paced instrumental, the listener is left gasping for breath as more and more sadistic scenarios are described. When all is revealed in a wonderful denouement, the listener will almost invariably think "Oh well, the dead ones had it coming to them", this is because of Cave's incredible talent of making the least sympathetic characters of his songs become the most engaging of anti-heros.

"The Kindness Of Strangers" and "Crow Jane" are rather peculiar in relation to the rest of the album. The former is a rather straightforward narrative which seems a bit unsatisfactory when it ends. Cave has inserted a moral about stranger danger and it is unclear exactly how he wants this to be taken. Nonetheless, the story itself is quite a clever idea and the muffled crying as the song fades out is a nice touch. "Crow Jane" is almost too poetic for its own good, as it takes a few listens to work out exactly what's going on. Granted Cave is a singer-songwriter, but on an album of murder ballads, it would be nice to be able to understand everything first go - guts and glory, so to speak.

"O'Malley's Bar" is the only misfire of the album. It appears to almost be a jam session at times, with Cave trotting out a bizarre lyric about a killer with a God-complex killing all the occupants of a bar. There's nothing wrong with that, but the length of the song (some 15 minutes) is rather tedious. There is some room for Blixa Bargeld to deliver his sound effects, which fans of Einsturzende Neubauten will recognise very quickly.

The album ends with all the guests, plus a few others, joining in a version of Bob Dylan's "Death Is Not The End". Here, the effect that Cave was trying to achieve by counterpointing the female vocals of Harvey and Minogue with his own dark voice is completely realised. The addition of some vocals with German accents provides a third contrast.

Overall, absolutely worthwile as a purchase. A tour-de-force of what Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds have been aiming at doing ever since their inception.

After repeated listenings, this remains one of my favorite albums of the past decade. It is strange, bizarre, dark, and sometimes utterly perverse, but somehow or other Cave has produced an album of great beauty and power. The premise is as the title would lead one to imagine: Cave collects nine songs somehow associated with murder. But the sheer variety of songs about murder is quite amazing. You find the comic as in "The Curse of Millhaven," the darkly nightmarish as in ironically titled "Song of Joy" (ironic because it tells the story of a man who has had his family killed by a serial killer) and the quietly tragic as in the beautiful "Where the Wild Roses Grow." Cave does his own version of the most famous murder ballad ever written, "Stagger Lee," his version incorporating only the nastiest and more prurient elements traditionally associated with the song. Finally, in the epic "O'Malley's Bar," Cave serves up a strange tale in which a man who is either insane or utterly amoral slaughters all the people in a bar, while he stops to admire himself in the bar's mirrors.

There really isn't a weak number on the album, but if there is a touch that truly marks this out as a special album, it is the ironic song that closes the album, a rather obscure Bob Dylan song entitled "Death is not the End."

In retrospect, this album, which summed up all the reflections on death and violence that could be found on Cave's previous albums, took the theme to a level where he had nowhere else to go. In a way, this may have prepared Cave's transition to a more religious perspective. I am reminded of the words someone spoke to J.-K Huysmans after he published AGAINST NATURE: the view of life express in it was so bleak that, his friend said, afterwards the only two options were the church or the noose.

The painting on the front of the CD is clearly NOT a Bob Ross, for there is just no way that Bob Ross could adequately paint up some Nick Cave. The main problem has to do with the fact that there are no 'happy trees' in Nick Cave, and none especially in _Murder Ballads_. If there were, they were burnt down long ago. This disc may be one of his most popular, which gets some die-hard 'fans' to doubt it, but the tracks on this disc are soundly dark and violent and tender. Aside from a fine ensemble Dylan cover at the end, with PJ Harvey and Shane MacGowan among others, I find myself clinging to tracks like "Lovely Creature" and "Song of Joy," and "O'Malley's Bar" is its own western movie AND soundtrack combined.

So turn down the lights and break out a couple of bottles of your reddest wine. I'm going to be listening to this one all through Christmas.

4.5 stars

Watching Cave's amazing movie, _The Proposition_, last week brought me back to this highly noteworthy release in Cave's catalog. This is because _The Proposition_ is like one big, long murder ballad; like the album, it alternates between brutality, lyricism, a confusing mix of the two, and other emotions besides. I came close to wearing this CD out when I bought it at its release ten years ago (I know that's not supposed to be possible), but in the decade since it got lost in the mix of the rest of Cave's huge catalog (I'm especially partial to _More Pricks Than Kicks_, _From Her to Eternity_, and _The Boatman's Call_).

I have to say that _Murder Ballads_ definitely stands the test of time and is one of his best releases of the '90's. After the lukewarm _Henry's Dream_, Nick and the boys really hunkered down in the studio to create a truly distinctive piece. Its only true weakness is the ho-hum cover of Dylan's "Death Is Not the End" at the end of the CD. Otherwise, these are songs you can return to over and over, while always pulling some new sort of sensation out of the experience.

Starting with "Song of Joy," we hear the band spinning the kind of atmospheric psychoticism that they began to move away from more and more around the release of _Tender Prey_ (which, surprise, brought them more commercial success than ever before). What I'm suggesting here is that this song and a lot of the rest of the album is like a successful fusion of the bands more-ragged Birthday-Party-inspired Southern Gothic craziness exhibited on _Your Funeral My Trial_ with the slicker stuff like _Tender Prey_. Oh and "Song of Joy" is an absolutely terrifying beginning to this CD.

"Stagger Lee" is kind of a murder blues, much like "Crow Jane" and "O'Malley's Bar"; the band sets up a vamp and Nick just waxes evil over the whole thing. You'd be hard-pressed to find songs like these anywhere else.

The highlights of the album are the lyrical moments, all of them featuring female singers like PJ Harvey and Kylie Minogue. "Henry Lee," "Lovely Creature," and "Where the Wild Roses Grow" all manage to wrest considerable pathos from the most morbid of subject matter and this has everything to do with Cave's compositional skills, both on the keyboard and with his pen. The soaring duets also add to the uncanny effect. Absolutely indispensable listening.

With the release of _The Proposition_ to compare and contrast to this CD, we can rightly call Nick Cave the Master of the Macabre Love Lyric. Granted, there isn't much proper competition, but there is certainly something very noteworthy about exploring the sublime in the subject of death. On this album, Cave and the Seeds put it all out there. On _The Proposition_ he took it to epic proportions. Cave's got a lot of juice in him yet; one can only wonder what spin he will put on the faces of murder next.

In the early 90s, Nick Cave began to show a lighter, more sensitive side. Albums like Let Love In revealed a Cave who believed in faith, hope, and love (and the greatest of these love), and people wondered if the prophet-of-doom would ever return. Then he hit us hard with Murder Ballads, complete with brooding cover art and a Parental Advisory warning label. The grim Cave reaper was back!

So we thought. At closer inspection, Murder Ballads actually stays on a very parodic path, with even the sickest, most gruesome ballads retaining a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor. Take, for instance, "Stagger Lee," a song too vulgar and twisted to even begin describing in an Amazon.com review, yet I doubt anyone could make it through the song without displaying a wildly goofy grin. "Lee" is a hit (or, more accurately, a PUNCH) that was both a daring and magnificent move for Cave, worth the price of the album alone.

The rest of Murder Ballads holds other surprises as well. Cave's use of female vocalists in several numbers (both in foreground and background) is inspired, especially in "Where the Wild Roses Grow," one of the best and more serious songs on the disc. The dark tale is told with enough haunting recollection to make goose bumps sprout in places you've never imagined.

With all the violent outbursts put forth into Murder Ballads, it was appropriate to end with Dylan's "Death Is Not the End." Here we are given a showcase of all the vocalists in the record, each declaring in their unique style, "Just remember, death is not the end." A word of comfort, perhaps? Hard to say; since Murder Ballads is such a blackly humorous, twisted album to begin with, this last number is almost too cheerful and hopeful, providing quite the opposite effect.

So, the question is, what was Cave trying to say with this record? Was he again channeling the Old Testament parables of the past, or perhaps making a statement about serial killers, or just trying to entertain us with some horrific, funny tales? I'll let you ponder over those questions if you like. For me, Cave's music goes beyond simple answers. It's something that speaks to you, whether the voice is saying "Baby, I love you" or "I'm the bad ____-_____ called Stagger Lee."

I am simply another fan coming forth to praise what must surely be one of Nick Cage's greatest CDs, Murder Ballads. Sometimes comical yet sickening, other times grotesque and frightening, Murder Ballads is a wonderful CD. It is cruel, it is horrifying, and at times it is even beautiful.

It features songs like "Stagger Lee", an intensely violent song that is fraught with expletives and violence to an almost absurd degree. "The Curse of Millhaven" is a strange, macabre story of an insane, young adolescent who goes on a rather large killing spree. My personal favorite is "Where the Wild Roses Grow", a harrowing and beautiful song sung in counterpoint between a woman and her killer.

Though these songs feature violence and strong language, they go far beyond gangster rap and the like. They either allow the listener to peer into the mind of truly twisted madmen, or they allow the listener to hear the woeful and often sickening stories of these madmen's victims. Many of them are brilliant, though I have a single complaint: some of the songs are too similar. Beyond that, this CD is wonderful.

There's black humour, and then there's blacker humour and then there's this album, where the humour is, in words of early Nick Cave, blacker than the chambers of the dead nun's heart. You would not want to meet the protagonists of these songs in a dark alley, and they are a sick and perverted bunch, but their misdemeanors are brought to life in such a dead pan, hilarious style, and set to greatly original music.
The comic standouts are Curse of Millhaven about deranged and fascinating little Ms Lottie, who cheerfully admits to being a monster, and the O'Malley's Bar, about a long and winding road to hell and a bar massacre, described in minute and drop dead funny details. It's hard to say how many people actually drop dead in this one, but it a whole lot of them.
There are some songs where it's all about the haunting mood, like Lovely Creature and Kindness of Strangers, and they may not seem as fascinating as the more dynamic slashers, but even there, every character is fleshed out in a unique fashion. And then there are these most colorful ones, the erudite killer in the first song, contrasted with rude and crude Stagger Lee, whose story is described in what are arguably the filthiest lyrics ever penned. Even one line from this song would get this review axed asap and put me on the Amazon black list; suffice to say, don't play this one loud in your car when you have some sensitive folks for your company. Wild Roses is cuss free but equally disturbing, with a star turn from prim Kylie Minogue. I have seen her live with Cave and she can't sing that low for the life of her, but she brings a touch of beguiling innocence and is a great partner for him in this song. Among many other musical guests, the best is probably P J Harvey, who sounds great in simple and wonderfully creepy story of Henry Lee. And finally, a host of Cave's friends, partners in crime and ex and current flames lift up their voices in a very depressing, everything is screwed, epic of Death is Not the End, penned by Bob Dylan. And so the album closes with a cover song, twisted as it may be, but it's Cave's lyrics and the musical contributions from the Very Bad Seeds (exquisite wailing from Blixa Bargeld should get a separate mention!) that shine so brightly on this gloriously dark album.

Prurient? Nefarious? Perhaps.

Also, lush and beautiful odes that take one mysteriously beyond the subject matter and into strangely soothing realms. While I did not want to love something I had assumed was glorifying something truly evil, I realized that these songs were as much about sadness, tragedy and psychosis as they were a guilty foray into the darkest fantasy. The songs effectively capture both sides of the coin, something this art form can only usually aspire to.

The memorably haunting and mysteriously lovely collaborations with Kylie and PJ make it worth the price of admission - I just cannot recommend how to wrestle your soul back from the devil!

Nick Cave is truly a strange and brilliant talent. I cannot stay away for long.