album // Murder Ballads
Murder Ballads is a 'frontier' LP, by which I mean an album that divides Nick Cave's post-Birthday Party work. It is the natural culmination of his interest in the 'murder ballad', often traditional songs dealing with death and savagery; it is the devil spirit that spooked the crap out of the American primitive music of Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie et al. For Cave, after dabbling in the genre throughout his career, putting together a whole album of often unpleasant material - I once read just how many characters died during the creation of the album - was Cave scratching a nagging itch, a way of getting it out of his system. The exercise was clearly cathartic, given the simple beauty of his subsequent material. Murder Ballads, despite its theme, was also responsible for introducing Nick Cave's name to a new audience with the moderately successful singles with PJ Harvey and Kylie. Shrewd indeed.
The album opens with one of the most intriguingly sinister of Cave's songs, 'Song Of Joy', which references 'Red Right Hand' from Let Love In, and tells the tale of a supposedly fearful man, who, after recounting his story of loss and sadness when his whole family was murdered, reveals himself to be none other than their assailant; the track concludes cataclysmically, leaving the listener wondering of the fate of the poor recipient of the narrator's story. Less subtle is 'Stagger Lee', a take on the traditional tale of Stag O'Lee, the original pimp character of legend, whoring and scoring and killing; just two tracks in and the body count is already soaring, but 'Stagger Lee' is also noteworthy for its musical presence, which is a kind of clipped and stuttering funk, with what can only be described as a hip-hop beat (it hardly makes Cave the Crow King Of Bling though).
'So it's Rorschach and Prozac and everything is groovy' is one of the inspired lines Cave delivers on the truly raucous 'The Curse Of Millhaven', recounting a psychotic and highly disturbed girl who literally gets away with blue murder as her early crimes are passed off as tragic accidents. It's a gleeful, good-natured song that just happens to deal with death, but does get inside the mind of a serial murderess who believes she's innocent. The contrast with the next track, 'Mary Bellows', is stark; the latter is tragic and moving, featuring Anita Lane weeping throughout the song. The song tells the tale of a young, polite and morally sound woman who travels to see the ocean for the first time, and winds up in bed with a bullet in her head after a companion traveller is spurned by her ethics. It is a brittle, tragic song.
My favourite track on Murder Ballads has always been 'Crow Jane', the tale of a woman whose generosity is abused by a troop of labourers, driving her to the point where she has to take a trip to see 'Mr Smith and Mr Wesson', where she leaves measuring '32-44-38', a clever play on gun calibres; it's a track filled with some of Cave's finest wordplay, featuring an astounding jazz accompaniment from the Bad Seeds (Mick Harvey, Blixa Bargeld, Jim Sclavunos, Thomas Wydler, Conway Savage and Martyn P Casey). Elsewhere on the album, contributions also come from Warren Ellis, Rowland S Howard and Brian Hooper.
The manic, almost improvised 14-minute 'O'Malley's Bar' ratchets up the death count, and is followed by an inspired cover of Bob Dylan's optimistic 'Death Is Not The End', featuring lines sung by the Bad Seeds, the album's guest vocalists (Lane, Harvey, a rambling Shane MacGowan and a somewhat overshadowed and meek Minogue), and a sing-a-long chorus by the miscellaneous cast; it's a serene end to an album so full of blood and bullets.