album // Tender Prey
Tender Prey is rightly hailed as a watershed album in Cave's career, and saw the singer consolidating his reputation as the premier prophet of bleak doom-laden themes. Religion and punishment are key recurrent themes on Tender Prey, the two strands looping round one another to become almost indistinguishable. Tender Prey is an altogether harsher, noisier affair than its predecessor, Your Funeral My Trial, and listened to in sequence the contrast is quite remarkable. It's also the first album where Cave's long-term misrepresentation as King of Goth was almost justifiable.
Tender Prey is a journey of sorts; excluding the bonus track (an alternative version of the opener 'The Mercy Seat'), the album starts apocalyptically with the rising intensity of the deathrow epic 'The Mercy Seat', and concludes with the serene Nina Simone-esque gospel singalong of 'New Morning'. What occurs between these two points is a set of songs evoking themes of crime, misdemeanour and passions, the sequencing of which seems to suggest the post-death memories of the man sloughing off his mortal coil in the electric chair in 'The Mercy Seat'. However, by this measure, 'New Morning' is almost like the opening of heaven's gates, a fresh start if you like, but on the strength of the criminal acts which Cave recounts in the first person on tracks like 'Up Jumped The Devil' or 'Deanna', our God must be pretty open-minded these days to allow someone off so lightly. Either that or the tracks actually work backward toward the story-teller's birth, with his life taking a sharply different turn into crime - his life flashing before his eyes? Either way, as a storybook, this is unsurpassably excellent.
'The Mercy Seat' has become an anthem of sorts for Nick and The Seeds, open to constant reinterpretation with each successive tour, most recently being heard as a mournful ballad. The track was also covered by Johnny Cash, completing a circle that places Cave within the same sphere as the late country legend, but also acknowledges the debt Cave owes to the dark country mysticism of the gravel-voiced one. The rising volume, velocity and lyrical urgency capture the slowly ascending current circulating around the frame of the electric chair, up through the narrator's veins, blood and scalp. Its gruesome, epiphanic albeit harrowing stuff, and the way Cave blends the irony of the doomed man's situation with that of Christ's crucifixion is as inspired as it is near blasphemous. The narrator's recollections of prison life in just a couple of sentences captures the vicious jail danger of films like The Shawshank Redemption, except there's no happy ending here. The convict's insistence that he'd never lied, that he's 'not afraid to die' is replaced by the final line with an admission of fear of the unknown. Musically, the track is a feat of solid production and spot-on playing, the atmospheres dark and churning in a style reminiscent of early Neubauten, the musical equivalent of flicking the switches and seeing the guages rise with the current.
The tone mellows on tracks like 'Alice' or 'Mercy' - both are beautiful in their instrumentation, but both have a sinister double edge that Cave has almost certainly trademarked. His ability to develop scenes of anguished love before rapidly making them go awry is second to none, and on 'Mercy' he blends suffering and criminality in a style that grounds his love of the murder ballad at a relatively early stage in his 'solo' career.
I have always thought that the music of The Bad Seeds was totally unique. I maintain that view to this day, although I can now hear the influence of older folk music forms on his work. Here it is blues that informs their sound most clearly, whether it be the maelstrom of 'City Of Refuge' or the heavy bass, electro-acoustic guitar and piano of 'Sunday's Slave', my personal favourite here. 'Sunday's Slave' is a simple, poetic piece running through the days of the week, but drawing together scenes of misery and hierarchical power along the way.
Cave's voice is truly sensational here - close-miked, intense, raw and confident, a style which runs onward from here into albums up to Murder Ballads. Having seen footage of Nick live, you can tell that even in the studio the microphone stand does not sit comfortably with the singer, instead preferring to stalk around the studio, cupping the mic with both hands, bent almost double to ensure the most strained, ravaged and emotional vocal. Wretched and restless, Cave's genius status was plain to see on Tender Prey. The Bad Seeds are as tight as ever, consisting of Blixa Bargeld, Mick Harvey, the late Roland Wolf, Thomas Wydler, Kid Congo Powers and a contribution from former Bad Seed Hugo Race.