Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (a term I am here using to refer also to Grinderman, the Birthday Party, the Boys Next Door and the recent Cave/Ellis duo, as there is no clear membership distinction between these groups but also to simply refer to them as “Nick Cave” would be to surrender too much to the remorseless march of auteur theory) is my favourite band of all time. They have also released albums at an almost annual rate since 1979, and I am increasingly embarrassed to have not listened to all of them, something I committed to remedy in 2023. With this blog live again, I wanted to document the experience. These are my thoughts on every album by Australia’s least-Steve-Irwin-adjacent contribution to popular culture, 1979’s from Door Door (lol) through to 2021’s Carnage. I initially accompanied this list with a rating system but as the list went on I became more and more frustrated with trying to reflect my full opinion numerically; however, as the initial raison d’etre of that raiting was to provide a “where to start” guide for people looking to get into the band, I will do a quick beginner’s guide here:
Best overall album: Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus
Best “career in a bottle” summarization album: Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!
If you want goth shit: Let Love In
If you want the blues: Junkyard
Best Grinderman album: Grinderman 2
Best Birthday Party album: Grinderman 2
If you heard about Nick Cave cause he’s PJ Harvey’s ex: The Boatman’s Call
Right. Let’s get going.
Door, Door (1979) – with The Boys Next Door
Reviled by its creators and forgotten by fans, Door Door is an adolescent mashup of Wire’s Pink Flag and The Go-Go’s Beauty and the Beat. But honestly it’s not a terrible impression: the future Birthday Party lineup have a real knack for twisting post-punk chicken wire into tight and pacy melodies. The weak leak here, surprisingly, is Cave himself: not only is his gulping moan still undeveloped and often flat, but he also brings entirely the wrong kind of charisma, sounding as uncommitted to the pop-rock cliches he is imitating – the melismatic “woah-oh-ohs” in choruses and pre-choruses, the teenage relatability of the lyrics – as a church pastor singing a chart hit at the youth group. Both men are much more at home with fire and brimstone.
The Birthday Party (1980) – with The Birthday Party
“Huh,” said my girlfriend. “It sort of sounds like Madness, but less whimsical.” No longer mall-goth-mopey, but not yet gothic-architecture melodramatic, the band’s eponymous album is a clattering, angular mess of funk rhythms and bleating guitars. Satisfyingly nihilistic and hostile, The Birthday Party flexes Cave and co’s noisemaking muscles well but lacks the charisma and character of later releases – Cave’s strangled yowl is a suitable companion for the furore backing it, but not yet the protagonist.
Prayers on Fire (1981) – with The Birthday Party
The first album to feel somewhat of a species with the most recent Bad Seeds records (although the distance is still vast – think Beowulf in comparison to The Sun Also Rises), Prayers on Fire debuts some of Cave’s long standing strengths and weaknesses: in the former camp, his penchant for elevating post-punk raving to biblical heights, and in the latter camp, his over-fondness for dismal spookhouse kitsch. That slows the album to a sore crawl on some moments (“Capers” is less than 3m long but feels much, much longer), but overall the musicianship saves it: the screeching brass on “Zoo Music Girl”, Cave’s voice at last distinguishable above the clamour, the scurrilous basslines rushing to hold up the melody.
Junkyard (1982) – with The Birthday Party
As chaotic as the self-titled album and as vigorous as Prayers on Fire, Junkyard sprawls like a gothic melodrama and sounds like botched dentistry. While furore and clamour are the order of the day, reaching into American blues music (an enduringly fruitful vein for Cave and his troupe to mine) gives the less frenetic songs a stately, almost anthemic swagger – “Several Sins” is perhaps the only song the Birthday Party ever wrote that can be fully enjoyed while sitting down.
From Her to Eternity (1984) – with The Bad Seeds
From Her to Eternity’s percussive bundle of soapbox-twangs and organ clangs create a piecemeal, theme park attraction evocation of the bluesy southern gothic that would define the Bad Seeds’ pre-Boatman’s Call output. Still, the tone here is closer to 2000 Maniacs than to Blood Meridian. Not yet a fluent poet, Cave is nonetheless already a master mimic of narrative voice, and the blackguards and bible thumpers he impersonates sound convincingly terrifying. From Her to Eternity is an eerie and surprisingly witty bag of vignettes, but lacks the coherence required to support its more ambitious tracks – the +9m closer, “A Box for Black Paul”, decidedly outstays its welcome.
The Firstborn is Dead (1985) – with The Bad Seeds
The Firstborn is Dead boasts a magnificently ominous title, but finds the Bad Seeds at an awkward crossroads. Once the most auteur of punks, Mr Cave begins a long-term transformation into the most punkish of auteurs, and neither he or his band have quite got there yet. The Firstborn… draws out its razor-thin blues lines like it’s removing them from a wound, and while the effect is affecting and at times compelling (opener “Tupelo” is a standout) the overall package is just a little too haphazard to be eerie, and ultimately more dull than patient.
Kicking Against the Pricks (1986) – with The Bad Seeds
Bashful as its creators are about in retrospect, what makes Kicking Against the Pricks a great album is just how much fun everybody involved is clearly having. The band approaches this suite of covers and traditional arrangements with scholarly reverence, fanboy aplomb and real interpretive verve – their surging rendition of “All Tomorrow’s Parties” deftly preserves the languor of the original even in the early Seeds’ pacier, punkier tone.
Your Funeral… My Trial! (1986) – with The Bad Seeds
Recorded in the throes of heroin addiction, Your Funeral… is about as inaccessible as the Bad Seeds would get until Skeleton Tree. Its 42 minutes of sickly, haunted blues feel like an approximation, via 3-5 minute confessionals (and the +9m “The Carny”) of the kind of mood that Godspeed You Black Emperor would flay and rack-stretch their songs to achieve a decade later. Ramshackle and exhausted, Your Funeral… nonetheless sees the Bad Seeds master the art of grooving and jamming, and is a richer and more rewarding opus than any previous records, the secret perhaps being the kind of carefree performance you give when you genuinely don’t care if you’ll be alive to read the reviews.
Tender Prey (1988) – with The Bad Seeds
Iggy Pop, on hearing “About a Girl”, predicted Kurt Cobain could make his fortune with “a record full of that.” The same might be said of “The Mercy Seat”, which opens Tender Prey with a comprehensive and confident statement of the Bad Seeds’ two-part modus operandi: first, never shy away from melodrama, and second, write that melodrama like you want it to win the Booker. The album that follows – blues dial a tad down, goth dial a tad up – is compelling and oddly charming (even the ghoulish “Up Jumped the Devil” is weirdly adorable, in a Bruce Campbell sorta way) but messy, romping from ramshackle pop (“Deanna”) to eerie, allusive balladry (“Sunday’s Slave”).
The Good Son (1990) – with The Bad Seeds
The turn of the decade found Nick Cave sober, in love and happy. Album opener “Foi Na Cruz”could almost pass for Christmas music, but don’t let that throw you: this is a lesser ‘Seeds album, but not quite as chintzy as you might fear. Cave writes love songs well, arguably better than spooky ones (he is, at the end of the day, closer qua goth to a performance-artist bible-thumper version of Gomez Addams than to any corpsepainted bat-eater) and his songwriting here does a good job filtering Dusty Springfield and odd notes of Latin pop through a goth lens. Ultimately, though, The Good Son needed much longer in the editing room: it drags, in a way no prior album by the band had done and few have done since.
Henry’s Dream (1992) – with The Bad Seeds
Moody but less monotonous than Funeral, passionate but less messy than Tender Prey, Henry’s Dream jump starts the wretched blues of Firstborn in tighter, brighter package. It’s the sound of lessons being taken on board, but also the first appearance of long-time bassist and secret-weapon-in-residence Martyn P. Casey, a titanic and yet magnificently hooky presence who riffs and swaggers like a 50khz Keith Richards. Compellingly dangerous on “Jack the Ripper” and richly panoramic on “Loom of the Land”, Henry Dream’s one shortcoming is that it’s a touch repetitive: “John Finn’s Wife”, “Brother, My Cup is Empty” and “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry” are a great song but… well. Still, if I can forgive Motorhead filling their whole career with “Ace of Spades”, I can forgive this.
Let Love In (1994) – with The Bad Seeds
“R is for rape me, M is for murder me, A is for answering all of my prayers” swoons Cave on “Loverman”; that sort of adolescent edginess (along with a sudden fixation on the words “jangle” and “jangling”) blemishes what is nonetheless the first truly great Bad Seeds album. Let Love In is a gnarly record, raging and churning like good post hardcore on songs like “Jangling Jack” and “Loverman”. When it does pause for breath on “Red Right Hand” or “Ain’t Gonna Rain Anymore” the intake is cold and leaves a plume in the exhale. Cave’s piano and Harvey’s guitar sound for the first time cohesive and massive, and a band that has never been fond of bridges fully embrace in their stead the art of the colossal, richly layered climax: album standout “Lay Me Low” fuses dourness, arrogance and humour into one entity with the same force that, in the heart of a star, turns hydrogen into helium.
Murder Ballads (1996) – with The Bad Seeds
Murder Ballads is possibly the best Halloween album ever created, and the fact that it is treated as the magnum opus of a career as expansive and ambitious as Nick Cave’s feels like a glimpse into an alternate universe where, even after the Return of the King awards sweep, we still refer to Peter Jackson as “the Brain Dead guy.” Far from incompetent (Martyn P. Casey may be the most overlooked white man to ever play the bass), Murder Ballads nonetheless apotheosizes the kitschy morbidity that has long been one of this band’s bad habits, both in the sense that it is here carried too ponderously to be enjoyed as boarding-school shockery, and in the sense that there’s almost a full damn hour of the stuff. “Song of Joy” and “Death is Not the End” are well chosen respectively as opener and closer, and “Stagger Lee” is a cool musical B-movie, but Murder Ballads is musically as repetitive as Let Love In is climactic, and narratively is as compelling as a well-written chain email.
The Boatman’s Call (1997) – with The Bad Seeds
Approaching middle age, Cave seems to have developed an interest in oulipou: toning one’s creative muscles by restricting oneself to a small part of one’s artistic palette. Boatman’s… lays the blueprints for the ensuing decade-plus of the Bad Seeds’ output, casting aside the macabre camp of the Let Love In era in favour of nominally secularised but undeniably religious fervour, in devotion to life, wife, the sweetness of loss and the self-evidencing sanctity of love itself. For the next almost-twenty years that emotional tone would find expression through rollicking guitar-gospel, heady jams and some of the gnarliest guitars since the Birthday Party era, but it first found voice here, sketched out with little more than a piano, some bass and the odd nylon-string flutter.
No More Shall We Part (2001) – with The Bad Seeds
At its worst, No More… revives the easy affection of The Good Son but trades the retro-pop magnanimity for rheumy, slow burning intimacy, into which Cave’s stalwart baritone fits like a hernia in a greeting card. That takes up far too much time on what is already one of the band’s more overlong albums, and that’s a shame because there is plenty to love here: the mad violin-hacking of newly-formalised bunyip-in-residence Warren Ellis (a member of the noble tradition of pet virtuosos sitting behind self-taught auteurs – see Greenwood, Jonny and Gilmour, David) gives “Oh My Lord” a hell of a climax. There’s panache on “Hallelujah” and wit on “God is in the House”, but it’s a commitment to dig these out from beneath the 15+ feet of pure white snow burying them.
Nocturama (2003) – with The Bad Seeds
Less challenging than Let Love In but better than No More Shall We Part, Nocturama finds the Bad Seeds at their most accessible. The piano ballads are too hooky for Boatman’s but also not cloying with schmaltz, the rock numbers are cleanly produced but massive, and the one truly out-there moment of the album (well, the truly out-there fifteen minutes – you’ll know it when you, father, mother, brother, the athlete with his hernia, picasso with his guernica, warren, blixa, the lighting guy and the mixer, mick, marty and everybody at the party hear it) is stashed right at the back and is, even in its silly, politically incorrect way, an extremely good time. It’s Nick Cave pretending to be Elton John, is what it is. It’s a bit goofy, a bit uneven, and deliriously fun. It is, however, the last Nick Cave album to date to be somewhat average. From here onwards, stuff gets really interesting.
Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus (2004) – with The Bad Seeds
Half-ringtone and half-evangelion, the manic piano shuffle of “Get Ready for Love”, trumpets the arrival of Nick Cave’s to-be-concluded golden age in awe-inspiring fashion. Never as complex as Cohen or as timely as Dylan, Cave makes truly evident here his USP as an auteur: though his personal faith waxes, wanes and morphs, his favourite book is the bible. And “biblical” is the operative word here, both aesthetically – gospel choirs, freewheeling rubato, Cave’s own preacherly fervour – and tonally: the emotions are unabashed, universal and mythically vast. Its fear is apocalyptic, its mischief is prophetic, its love is devotional; its bittersweet moments speak to the fate of nations and its humour evokes the inscrutably symbolous scatology that first endears Ovid and Shakespeare to eleven-year-olds. Tom Waits could out-eerie Murder Ballads and The Pop Group could out-transgress Junkyard, but whatever is happening on Abattoir absolutely could not come from anyone else.
Grinderman (2006) – with Grinderman
It would seem that when presented with an electric guitar, Cave’s response is not to learn the basics but rather to try and throttle it to death – it’s less like Steve Jones and more like six strings worth of pitched percussion; amelodic squawks and squeals, rather than riffs of any sort, are the order of the day. It’s intense, obviously, but found so far from his comfort zone here Cave is also self-effacing and almost humble. Intoxicating as Abattoir’s Miltonian excess was, after a double album of the stuff it’s a giddy thrill to hear Cave outline with trademark vividity stories of getting laid (“Get it On”), avowedly not getting laid (“No Pussy Blues”), trying to own and reclaim not getting laid (“Go Tell the Women”) but also really wanting to get laid (“When My Love Comes Down”).
Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! (2008) – with The Bad Seeds
Released halfway between the colourfully-literal Let Love In and the fully abstract Ghosteen, Lazarus is a faintly Tom-waits-esque collection of character profiles that leaves its deepest marks when placing those characters amid the surreal, vividly drawn worlds they inhabit: Lazarus losing his mind amid LA paparazzi, a jilted obsessive stalking ruined city streets with radio in hand, Odysseus sauntering through clubs and backrooms. More than that, though, Lazarus is a lean-ish 53m spent casually perfecting nearly every idiom with which Cave has toyed. “Hold Onto Yourself” sits with the loveliest of Boatman, “Moonland” with the most perverse of Let Love In; “Lie Down Here (And Be My Girl)” out-rocks Grinderman, “We Call Upon The Author” out-thrashes The Birthday Party. “More News From Nowhere” is as mythic as anything on Abattoir and when Cave murmurs “and now we hit the streets…” on “Night of the Lotus Eaters”, the grisliest Murder Balladeer would quake.
Grinderman 2 (2010) – with Grinderman
Grinderman 2 consists of the fleshed-out anthems one builds on the experimentalism of Grinderman; it’s overall gnarlier, more accessible, a tad less consistent and better. Dragging a bit in the middle with a few songs that are touch ponderous (“Kitchenette”), a touch messy (“Evil”) or both (“What I Know”), Grinderman 2 nonetheless opens and closes with four of the most vivid statements in this whole vivid discography: the one-chord train crash of “Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man” careens into the shamanic horndoggery of “Worm Tamer” at the start; the album then re-emerges with the Barry-White-by-way-of-Salvador-Dali love song “Palaces of Montezuma” before finishing off with “Bellringer Blues”, in which Cave swaps book recommendations with the Angel Gabriel in one of the first post-apocalyptic wastelands to feel hot rather than irradiated. It’s great. I love it. Full marks.
Push the Sky Away (2013) – with The Bad Seeds
Listening to Sky feels like staring at an optical illusion: these are such full, rich songs, and yet there is so little going on at any one time. Chord progressions alight for a moment on piano, and then dart to guitar and then synth, never staying, never forming into a clear motif – and yet from this nothing, songs emerge which are clearly structured and surprisingly accessible. If Abattoir was Ulysses, Sky is Waiting for Godot, both in its inscrutable minimalism and in its existential bleakness, which is unobtrusive, almost polite, and all the more horrifying for it: in a world full of somethings, hinting at an elusive nothingness behind it squares far better with everyday experience than the Sartre-via-Rick-and-Morty nihilism that would be de rigeur in pop culture this decade. There is love, adventure and colour on this album no less than on Abattoir, but also candour: the love is impermanent, the adventure is increasingly tiring, and the colour is only a small blue dot in a very large night indeed.
Skeleton Tree (2016) – with The Bad Seeds
“You fell from the sky, crash-landed in a field near the River Adur”, goes the first line of Skeleton Tree. However Cave performed that line when first ad-libbing it in 2016, the solemn murmur committed to Skeleton Tree is reverent to the point of shellshock, recorded only months after, not far from that river, his son was tragically killed in a fall. That is the nature of Skeleton Tree: it is an album whose meaning was wrenched savagely out of the artist’s control in the march from conception to creation. Grief is everywhere and nowhere, rarely the subject but inescapably the context. The songs, already risky forays into a new language of bluesless ambiance, often feel incomplete and sometimes clumsy, and yet if they were otherwise, it would imply some ability or desire to sculpt and re-purpose absence. Skeleton Tree testifies to the lack of that, and yet it is still in its own way universal: it speaks to climate grief (“Anthrocene”) and addiction (“Magneto”), to the capacity of any loss to shatter the contracts we make with our lives (“Distant Sky”), and to the ordinary world one still wakes up to after the worst has come (“Skeleton Tree”). It is, for its aesthetic flaws, a complete artistic product and not simply a curio. But it is not one that I regularly listen to unless I need it.
Ghosteen (2019) – with The Bad Seeds
If Sky evokes the sunset and Skeleton Tree suffers the night, Ghosteen at last is the dawn – weighed heavily by what it has endured in the dark, and yet proud, liberated and gloriously bright. After answering Sky’s questions and weathering Skeleton Tree’s trauma, Ghosteen forlornly confirms that you can never heal into the fresh young self you were, and yet you heal, into something that remains – has to remain – worth being. Ghosteen speaks in the shapeless warmth of analogue synths, and its lyrics are purposefully fragmented into disconnected images, frozen on the page at the moment of inspiration. Yet unlike Skeleton Tree, Ghosteen has a steady hand on the reins: for a borderline-ambient album that runs over an hour in length, it passes quickly and almost thrillingly, with only a few moments of dragging: climaxes on “Sun Forest” and “Waiting For You” are quiet and minimal and yet pay off tension the way a shrug pays off a heavy load. Healing, like grief on Skeleton Tree, is everywhere and yet rarely acknowledged. It is somewhere ahead. We are moving purposefully towards it. We have not seen it. We believe in it. We are not there yet.
Carnage (2021) – with Warren Ellis
On hearing “White Elephant” – a magnificent, dangerous track, funny and colourful, high-windowed and edifying – one might ask: after three works of minimalism, is the world’s primo nondenominational skelevangelist back? Not exactly, but the wearier, more introspective Nick Cave that has emerged from the remorseless 2010s has inherited his skills – and his rolodex, with long-time lieutenant Warren Ellis now given equal billing. Carnage is a strange, inconsistent album, not as good at ambience as Ghosteen yet keen to get all its anthems out of the way by the end of the first half. Yet its best moments are fascinating, evoking the pop-song-length contemporary-classical-without-an-orchestra work of Kristin Hayter or Scott Walker: there’s no post-punk precedent for the eerie prologue-to-verse slump that opens “Hand of God”. Carnage is perhaps best thought of as Nick Cave’s Kid A, but released at twice the age Thom Yorke was in 2001. I would not blame him for throwing in the towel after this one. But I hope not. Carnage is not Nick Cave’s best album, but no other has left me so curious about what could be coming next.