New anthology looks at legacy of Nick Cave
Anthology celebrates Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ turbulent longevity
Lovely Creatures: The Best of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (1984-2014) Available Friday
A hammered piano forecasting violence. A brutalized guitar. An unhinged vocal that escalates from obsessive to homicidal. Taken on its own, the thrilling title track of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ debut album, From Her to Eternity, sounds like a band on the verge of implosion. And yet, 33 years later, it is the opening salvo in a lavish cataloguing of one of the most enduring and iconoclastic contemporary groups, and of a riveting songwriter rightly mentioned in the same breath as Cohen and Waits.
Lovely Creatures: The Best of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (1984-2014) arrives Friday in multiple formats, including double CD, triple vinyl, and a three-CD package with DVD. All are worth considering for neophytes seeking an entry point to a discography that has grown dense and daunting for outsiders.
The three-CD, 45-song version isn’t an excessive starter kit for a catalogue of this depth. Cave is often spoken of in shorthand — dark, literate, intimidating, snappy dresser — but when you record the holy love song Into My Arms, shortly after an X-rated swagger through the traditional murder ballad Stagger Lee, you deserve a detailed introduction. There is room here not just for the songbook staples — the pulse-racing, death-row narrative The Mercy Seat, The Ship Song’s state of grace, the transformative drama Jubilee Street — but also deeper cuts rounding out a portrait of a mutable band that has changed shape and sound while retaining a rare intensity.
The set’s biggest flaw lies in the decision to give each decade its own disc — a symmetry that yields a lopsided song selection, with nearly half the discography raced through on the first CD thanks to a feverish early prolific streak.
There are few fair-weather fans in the Bad Seeds’ growing global cult — Cave’s obsessions with lust, divinity and catastrophe have in turn attracted an obsessed following — but the many who have already internalized every song will find their money’s worth in Lovely Creatures’ “super deluxe” format.
In addition to the three CDs, the DVD is included here; it features two hours of concert footage, TV appearances and tantalizingly brief but potent interview clips, stretching back to a scene of Cave with bat-nest hair raging through a diabolical From Her to Eternity in 1984.
From there, the DVD flashes forward to a refined 2001 reading of Love Letter, a vulnerable soliloquy from a true romantic. Two views of the Bad Seeds, entirely different in spirit and almost entirely different in membership, are bonded by Cave’s vivid poetry and magnetic baritone.
The super-deluxe Lovely Creatures also includes a 256-page hardbound book that doesn’t skimp on archival treasures. Bad Seeds’ past and present are nodded to, with pride of place for longtime prime movers Mick Harvey and Blixa Bargeld and Cave’s current foil Warren Ellis. Pages of rare photographs are bookmarked with frames of film, sketches on convincingly stained loose-leaf and other keepsakes. Essays range from sometimes overly academic treatises on Cave’s wicked humour and the Bad Seeds’ cinematic scope, to fascinating insiders’ views of the making of the raucous 2008 album Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! and 2013’s tremulous and tender Push the Sky Away.
Cave writes in the book’s afterword that Lovely Creatures was scheduled for release in 2015, but was overtaken by circumstances that “created a different person to inhabit this old skin.” The death of Cave’s son Arthur haunts Skeleton Tree, released in September and not represented in the anthology. It may be the Bad Seeds’ greatest album — it’s certainly the most emotionally devastating.
The Bad Seeds’ ferocious live reputation has been as strong as ever in recent years: Cave was especially confrontational on their last North American tour, in 2014, ignoring security barriers and terrorizing audience members at close range. Still, when a tour was announced in support of Skeleton Tree, including an imminent North American leg, it came as a surprise to many fans wondering if Cave’s newest songs would be too painful to relive every night.
Reports from the first leg, in Cave’s native Australia in January, suggested the shows have been part catharsis, part celebration. They in no way suggested Cave has been broken. The album he was driven to record has an unshakable place in his legacy. But now, with a lovingly compiled retrospective in hand, the attention shifts toward the full scope of what the Bad Seeds have accomplished.
Near the end of the Lovely Creatures DVD, two interviews are sequenced together from three decades apart. In 1985, when the Bad Seeds were stoking their misanthropic fire, Cave said “I would hope that I wasn’t involved in music,” by the time he reached his 50s. In 2014, three years from his 60th birthday, he spoke of the feeling that there’s always work to be done.
In light of that reassuring change of heart, it’s appropriate that Lovely Creatures arrives incomplete: Cave and the Bad Seeds remain restless. To paraphrase Jubilee Street, every new recording finds them transforming, vibrating, glowing, flying. What comes next is anyone’s guess.
There are few fair-weather fans in the Bad Seeds’ growing global cult.