album // The Firstborn Is Dead
In contrast to his debut 'solo' album, The Firstborn Is Dead sounds highly accomplished, with Nick Cave's vocal less prone to excess and the musical accompaniment from a three-piece Bad Seeds (Mick Harvey on drums, piano, guitar, organ, bass and backing vocals; Blixa Bargeld on guitar and backing vocals; and Barry Adamson on bass, guitar, organ, drums and backing vocals) is tighter, more focused. Much of this could be attributed to the excellent production record of Flood, but The Firstborn Is Dead has more in common with some of Nick Cave's later albums, when people stopped lumping him into the gothic camp.
Ignoring the CD's extra tracks (the single version of 'Tupelo' and its B-side 'The Six Strings That Drew Blood', a totally different song from that which was recorded with The Birthday Party), this album actually only includes 7 tracks, one of which is a supreme cover version and extension of Bob Dylan's 'Wanted Man', a song concerned with notoriety and gigolo con-artistry. So, six new Cave compositions, all of which are pretty lengthy, and all of which are of an exceptionally high standard.
Stylistically, if From Her To Eternity stalked through the killing fields familiar to The Birthday Party, The Firstborn Is Dead picks out some of the buried styles on the debut and exposes them confidently - blues, country-inflected rock, primitive American folk ('Black Crow King', with its slightly fearful theme sounds like the blues - back before it was even known as the blues). 'Train Long Suffering' even manages to bring in some rapturous Nina Simone-esque gospel drama (check the conclusion against her 'Mississippi Godamn' or 'I Got Life'). The single 'Tupelo', with its thundering drums and dense bed of guitar and bass, is as apocalyptic as they come, Cave's vocal adding to the hurricane intensity wreaking havoc on the song's small town community (the birthplace of Elvis Presley) and fnds Cave drawing on the material for And The Ass Saw The Angel. 'Knocking On Joe' is mournful and embittered, a slow-paced jail anthem that rises to a rich and intense blues conclusion. Harvey's piano is well featured here, his mastery of the instrument tinging the melancholy atmosphere of the song. Listening to the tracks here remind me of Harper Lee's classic novel, To Kil A Mockingbird, with its themes of betrayal and suffering, or more recently in The Cider House Rules.
Nick's vocal is here less naive, more comfortable, less prone to high-pitched caterwauling, and reveals a dark warmth that leads you into the heart of these tracks. Taking the role of wizened storyteller, Cave gives off the aura of a man who has sidled up to you at the bar, half-cut and keen to describe his experiences, starting cautiously before noticing your rapt attention, leading to enthusiastic and ebullient outpourings of grief and emotion. 'You can bring your burden down upon me,' he emphatically urges on 'Knocking On Joe', and you trust him, want to tell him your problems and woes so that he will impart more of his own. As backing bands go, The Bad Seeds are the perfectly adaptable accompaniment for Cave's emotional variations, capable of traversing stylistic switches from sparse, slide-guitar desert blues, to intense and deep emotional balladry, to devastatingly layered tracks, all to a degree that cannot find a mirror elsewhere, simply because no other band is called upon to perform so by their leader. Adamson's bass here, especially on the final album proper track, 'Blind Lemon Jefferson' is deep and astounding, the track settling to almost a duet between the erstwhile Magazine member and Cave's resounding vocal.
Sonically and lyrically inventive, referencing dying music forms, there is no paralell for the material here. Genius.