Little Ghost Songs
New chapters added to alternative history of The Bad Seeds’ expanding world. By Victoria Segal.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds ★★★★
B-Sides And Rarities Parts I & II BMG. CD/DL/LP
A RARITIES compilation isn’t about fullblown, album-sized perfection; at best it’s a strange shadow cabinet of curiosities, throwing light on the past and the future. Nick Cave has declared his fondness for the 2005 version of this compilation, assembled by (now former) Bad Seed Mick Harvey and reissued here as Part I, and it’s easy to see why. Here’s the chance to revisit the oddities and the misfits (Where The Wild Roses Grow with Blixa Bargeld taking the Kylie Minogue role, maybe), to see the sketches and blueprints, to hear what might have been.
The acoustic version of Tender Prey’s leprous spree-killing Deanna, for example, runs into the spiritual O Happy Day, the Bad Seeds black-lighting their song’s original splash of gospel DNA. The sloshing, boot-stomping 1993 take on Australian country song There’s No Night Out In The Jail, meanwhile, looks back to the criminally insane world of The Birthday Party and early Bad Seeds and foreshadows Murder Ballads. Most significant in hindsight, however, is the candlelit drama of Time Jesum Transeuntum Et Non Riverentum, recorded with
The Dirty Three in 1996, shortly before Warren Ellis joined The Bad Seeds. (The track wound up on an X-Files compilation, a genuinely unexplained phenomenon).
It is Ellis who curated Part II of B-Sides
And Rarities alongside Cave, moving the story on from 2008’s hectic Dig!!! Lazarus
Dig!!! There are still curiosities – Cave and Debbie Harry covering Jeffrey Lee Pierce’s weary Free To Walk, 2006’s Grinderman-era casualty Vortex, excellent B-side Hey Little Firing Squad – but the record divides with a stately live version of Push The Sky Away, performed with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.
What follows is a rich, revelatory selection of tracks from and around 2016’s Skeleton Tree and 2019’s Ghosteen, records profoundly shaped by grief. There are startling first outlines of Girl In Amber, Waiting For You and Bright Horses, as well as previously unreleased songs. The beautiful drone of Heart That Kills You finds new ways to tangle with Adam And Eve; Earthlings and Big Dream (With Sky) find different twists through Cave’s apocalyptic landscapes. “I have nothing against life per se,” sings Cave on Life Per Se, piano full of his
Boatman’s Call-era past, Ghosteen’s porous thrum still present.
On the spoken word of Steve McQueen, first seen during 2016 documentary One More Time With Feeling, Cave’s tightly knotted metaphors – flies, film stars, the Burj Al-Arab – loosen to a simple admission: “Someone’s got to sing the stars/And someone’s got to sing the rain/Someone’s got to sing the blood/And someone’s got to sing the pain.” These might not be the first Bad Seeds songs you would turn to for that, but even here, out at the margins, they’re up to the task.