Customer Reviews

Tender Prey

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is, without a doubt, Cave & The Seeds' best album up to this point, and many insist that it is their best to this day. It is the culmination of everything that they had been working toward up to this point, as good as ever, but more refined, better-sounding, smoother, in a word: better. This is their masterpiece. The Mercy Seat kicks things off and is one of the most astonishing songs I've ever heard in my life. The lyrics, matched with the crashing, momentum-gaining backdrop combine with the end result of one of the most intense song in Nick's or anyone else's catalog. This is simply one of the most powerful narraritives in contemporary music. This is one of the few songs that truly cannot be described-it has to be heard to be believed. To be sure, this is the highpoint of the album, but there are other highlights. Up Jumped The Devil is a pleasant rollicking, tongue-in-cheek tune of the type that Cave often indulges in. Deanna sounds like a 50's beach-ballad gone Satanic. Most of the rest of the album consists of Cave's trademark slow, brooding piano-led ballads, and the ones included here are some of his best ever. The seemingly upbeat, by contrast, and eminently beautiful song New Morning closes the album on a very nice note. Skip the shorter, tacked-on version of the Mercy Seat, it cannot top the original, and only serves to uproot the album's climax. However, the meat of the album (everything but it) is excellent, and serve to make this CD, surely, one of the most underrated out there. Essential.

This record was a massive influence on me back in the day. True, it's a bit dated now, but at times it is a vivid example of what Nick Cave does best. Namely, making great pop songs out mankind's darker impulses. If the kids on American Bandstand ever heard "Deanna", they might say, "it has a great beat & you can dance to it!" Even if it might serve as the soundtrack to serial killer, Charles Starkweather's 1950's spree. "Mercy Seat" is a classic in Cave cannon. The fact that Johnny Cash recently deigned to cover it to stunning perfection on SOLITARY MAN is all the proof one needs.

My personal favorites are, "Up Jumped The Devil" & "So Slowly Goes The Night". "Devil" not only features an infectious groove, but the lyrics are flat out hilarious. A perfect example of Cave's unique brand of black humor. I mean, who can resist a line like, "blacker than the chambers of a dead nun's heart"?

On "Night" he sounds drunker than Shane Macgowan at 3 a.m. He seems to be channeling his inner Dino on this one. Cave's singing is so atrociously off-key, not to mention gleefully lugubrious, that it would do any Holiday Inn lounge lizard proud. But with closer inspection, you can actually hear the sound of a man eating his heart right off his sleeve. In truth, it's the lyrics that save the day. They are as devastingly honest as they are poetic. The whole thing's pure magic in my book.

The closer, "New Morning" is the other classic on this record. I love how he compares the moon & the stars (of one night too many) to "the troops that laid conquored". So, who says poetry is dead? Some listeners out there might as well be.

As for the rest, "City Of Refuge", "Alice" & "Mercy" each have their charms to commend them. "Sunday's Slave" & "Sugar, Sugar, Sugar" may not rank as Cave's most compelling work, but they don't bog the proceedings down. I just wouldn't count them among my reasons for coming back to this record.

So TENDER PREY is a mixed, well dated affair. But at day's end, it makes for a memorable cocktail. For my money, it makes light out of career sparked by darkness.

I'm no tourist when it comes to Nick. From The Birthday Party's essential recordings to "The Boatman's Call"...I am no stranger to the genius that is Cave. This, however, was, is, and always will be THE quintessential album by Cave and the Seeds. "The Mercy Seat"? My God...does music come any more powerful than this? For the sake of mankind, I hope not...I don't think we could handle it.

This album always makes me think of East Berlin, when there was an East Berlin. Gloomy Artiste at Work in Desolate City...however, I'm not even sure if was recorded there (in 1987-8). The songs range from the searingly intense "Mercy Seat" to the punk rocker "Deana" to the impishly wicked "Up Jumped the Devil" to the mournful, pleading "Have Mercy", etc. Half these songs rock and half are very moody and melodic, with pretty piano lines way up in the mix. Nick's voice is in top demonic/tender crooner form throughout, and this album is as cool as the black and red motif of the CD cover picture. One of the greatest albums of the 1980's, and in my opinion, this is Nick's finest work.
It's wicked, it's fun, it's pretty, all at once. It's an ABSOLUTE MUST if you like Nick Cave!

This is probably my favorite Nick Cave album. Musically, it's very diverse going from intense rock ("The Mercy Seat", "Deaana", "City Of Refuge") to beautiful increasingly melancholy ballads ("Watching Alice", "Mercy", "Slowly Goes The Night") to middle ground territory ("Up Jumped The Devil"), but all with an extremely dark, isolated, scenic atmosphere that only Nick Cave could conjure. Americana, Piano ballad, Gospel, old 50's rhythm and blues, and uncategoirzable...all are on full display here. Cave's music is so starkingly original and relentlessly emotional in its melancholy that he exists in a world all to his own, and is 10 times more dark than any dumb metal band or cheesy goth artist. His lyrics are equally powerful, ranging from pure stories of horror and redemption to more isolated tales of desire and depression. Listening to this sounds like listening to a troubadour from the anarchic remains of the world. If that sounds like something you can handle, then dive right in.

Don't purchase this album or any Nick Cave album unless you are looking to find something entirely different from the same old radio and mtv junk being pounded down our throats for decades. He is in every way a true artist, pouring forth imaginative and creative oceans with every sound he makes. Nick Cave music belongs in the company of artists such as Dylan and Tom Waits. It's silly to pick out a certain song and declare it as the best, because this denies another listener their viewpoint . It is appropriate, however, to pick out a personal favorite. I feel Slowly Goes the Night is the quiet masterpiece of this record. The emptiness is expressed perfectly with Cave answering his own question, "how goes it? it goes lonely; it goes slowly.." Every song on this album is terribly worthwhile, to any worthwhile listener. So, if you like to listen to top 40 music and the local classic rock station and stand in front of mirrors playing air guitar, you are in the wrong area.

From the Boys Next Door to the Birthday Party to scary old Nick hunched at a piano actually thinking songs out I've been paying close attention to one of the most original performers of the last three(!) decades. Not for everyone, but if you like your singers "bellowing at the firmament" then Nick's your man, and "Tender Prey" is probably the best example of his art. The Bad Seeds are at their best, focusing the more rambling aspects of their earlier records, creating a chugging wall of sound that stops and starts on a dime. The songs are top notch, 'The Mercy Seat' cementing Nick's place in the tower of song if 'From Her To Eternity' didn't already. Other highlights are 'Up Jumped the Devil', 'City Of Refuge', 'Sugar Sugar Sugar', and 'Watching Alice', a sweetly morose peeping tom reminiscence that somehow makes adolescent curiosity and longing to see a little skin seem about as fun as attending one's own funeral. Aside from the great single 'Deanna' none of the songs here descend into the cartoony over-the-top "lonely girl dies under my boot with the gimp town mayor watching in a puddle in front of her grandmother's house on her birthday" that Nick perfected on subsequent records. Here the stories are more vague, complex, religiously tinged allusions to guilt, hopelessness, loss, and frustration. On 'Slowly Goes The Night' Cave pines for a recently departed lover, by "tracing the ghost of her bones with his trembling hand", knowing full well he drove her away while the Bad Seeds lighten the mood with an almost playful doo-wop chorus. Great stuff and, aside from the all covers "Kicking Against The Pricks", probably the most fully realized meeting of Bad Seed style and song.

"Tender prey" pretty much marks the border between Nick Cave's raw, more experimental albums ("From her to eternity", "First born is dead" and "Your funeral, my trial") and more accessable song collections that would follow with "The Good son", "Henry's dream" and further. That doesn't mean that our favorite mad preacher is up for cheap melodies and easy listening.
The opener here is the instant classic "The mercy seat", a haunting, seven minute monologue of a convict strapped in the electric chair. A verbal play about self doubt, conviction and unbearable knowledge of the Old Testaments's rage unfolds. The music is one stunning build-up to the inevitable end.
The three Bad Seeds dvd's which are available now, "The Video's" and the live performances "God is in the house" and "LIve at the Paradiso" all contain the song.
The documentary annex roadmovie video "The road to God knows where" shows a scene in which Nick Cave and the boys perform an accoustic version for a radio station, the live album "Live seeds" has it as the blasting first song, and when I saw Oncle Nick and his Bad Seeds in November 2004 at The Heineken Music Hall in Amsterdam, Holland, 'THe mercy seat' was good enough for the closing of the second encore.
That shows how this one song still stands up against time.

Other tracks include the sing-along rocksongs "Deanna" and "The city of refuge"; the angry sounding, half sung / half spoken word "Up jumped the devil" and the brooding, sinister pledge "Mercy", for me the highlight on this album (or the absolute depth, depends on which point of view you have on the world.)

Cave is the raging carnivore here, the mad musical stalker on stage, but O how we love to surrender ourselves to him, making us easy, willing prey...

This album was lent to me by a friend, and whether or not this was an impulse on his part is a mystery to me. However, these songs are hauntingly beautiful... "The Mercy Seat" practically a protest chant with the march-type drumming; the slow and perversely sad "Watching Alice".... this CD is one of those ones you'll find yourself hypnotized to... swaying in a deppressive dance and singing to the dark lyrics.

I'm in the amen corner of the industry critic and a couple of the reviewers here who think that this is Nick Cave's best effort to this point. I've been a Cave fan now for only a couple of years, but now have all of his CDs and have had the good fortune to have seen him perform several times as well. So that should make me somewhat of an authority on his music, right?
Cave has always shown great talent despite that his earlier work is rather uneven in quality. Here on Tender Prey, he finally puts together an album worthy of that talent and as the industry reviewer says, he only gets better from this album forward.
The most famous song here is Mercy Seat, a harrowing tale of the last inchoate thoughts of a man condemned to fry and die. The cacophony of the instrumentation only reinforces the potency of the lyrics. And most of us know by now that Johnny Cash reciprocated Cave's admiration of his work by covering Mercy Seat on one of his final recordings.
Mercy Seat is not by any means the only great song on the album. I like the darkly humorous Up Jumped the Devil, the yearning piano ballad Watching Alice, the brooding quasi-religious Mercy, the morbid Sunday's Slave, and the strident warnings of Sugar Sugar Sugar. Each of these songs, as well as others not mentioned show that Cave has come of age both as a musician and a songwriter.
Unlike a couple of reviewers, I don't feel that the inclusion of the second version of Mercy Seat is anticlimactic. I look at the two versions as the bread that envelopes this tasty musical sandwich. While this CD may not meet with the approval of those who are fans of Cave's earlier hard core goth punk, it should bring in new listeners who will grow to appreciate one of the finest new talents in a generation. Buy this, you'll see what I mean.