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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A confusing yet rewarding album., 21 Oct 2002
By A Customer
The one thing that often lacked in some Cave’s earlier work was consistency, not in terms of song quality. Even the weakest track is delivered with more passion and style than most of his peers. Its rather the way the album gels together. “Your Funeral My trial” sounds like sections from three different albums, combining Blues, ballads and glorious noise. Still this is a minor complaint about a fine collection of songs. The album starts with the title track. Built around a piano and organ accompaniment, it sounds like a lullaby with teeth. Stranger to kindness follows, the only song recorded by the Bad seeds (cover versions excluded) were Cave has neither wrote the lyrics or music. This task is handled by Anita Lane and Blixa Bargeld respectively. It’s a somewhat half-hearted effort Things pick up for Jacks Shadow, which has some great fractured guitar playing by Bargeld and backing vocals from the Bad Seeds. Its too melodic to be sinister
Then comes the album’s centrepiece a monster of a track “the Carny” an epic track even more cinematic than “red right hand.” Here Cave’s storytelling abilities come to the fore with the tale of a Carny who vanishes from a circus. It’s a jaw dropping song.
The spare atmospheric “She fell away” follows. Along with the Carny it’s the album’s highlight,
Showing how far Cave has come as a songwriter, now able to write disturbing numbers that
don’t spill into a chaotic wall of noise. “Hard on for love” and “Long time man” would have fitted comfortably on First Born is dead.
Between the two tracks is “Sad waters” a tender love ballad without any death or violence. Among one of Cave's most beautiful songs. Its ethereal beauty is a complete contrast to the jagged noise and darkness of the other tracks. Long Time man is owes more than a passing nod to “wanted man” by Dylan which the band covered on “first born” “Hard on” with its biblical metaphors to describe an almost animal lust sounds almost comical, it’s to Cave’s credit that he manages to pull it off. With lyrics like
“I am the fiend hid in her skirts
And it's as hot as hell in here
Coming at her as I am from above”
it’s either shockingly blasphemous or honestly perverse. If “Hard on” sounds perverse, then Scum is pure bile, with Cave spiting explicit lifted rant directed
at some poor journalist who dared to give Cave lodgings when he first moved to London. Cave was unimpressed with lodgings, to say the least. Some how, as an album, it all manages to make sense in a twisted perverse Nick Cave kind of way. While it is in not one of Cave’s best works, there are enogh songs of high calibre to make this a worth while buy.
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