Artist: Nick Cave
Label: Mute Records
Release: 1986
Runtime: 46:06
Rating: 4/5
Even though Cave’s artistic outlook, or better said his approach, is a mile away from any hint that the man wants to succeed commercially at all, the covers album “Kicking Against The Pricks” managed, to the band’s great surprise, to achieve exactly the opposite. It was a breakthrough to the music-loving masses, because it drew extraordinary praise.
“Your Funeral… My Trial” feels like a twin to “Kicking Against The Pricks” (1986). The energy on it is very similar, thanks above all to Nick Cave’s total lack of concern about performing the covers on “Kicking Against The Pricks” the way their authors do. So “Kicking Against The Pricks” itself could easily fool someone who’s hard of hearing into thinking it’s a Cave album of original material, that’s how singular Cave’s musical expressionism is. Incredibly powerful in its uniqueness, convincing, and always temptingly relevant for the curious listener.
Nick Cave is the definitive musical “weirdo.” His idols, the ones he listened to as a kid, from Bob Dylan to Leonard Cohen, Johnny Cash, and on to the greats of blues, americana, surf, gospel, get strained through the prism of the artist’s musical confession in such a warped manner that this musically expressionist moment of unique, unrepeatable essence is, all by itself, utterly fascinating. Cave, who by this point had sunk deep into heroin addiction, delivers yet another album saturated with a suffocating atmosphere, where you can count the rays of sunshine on the fingers of one hand. The foundation, once again, is the merging of minimalist motifs, magnified in the production so they form colorful, sonic, and thoroughly contrasting collages. Often the musical backdrop is built from nothing but drums and keyboards, or just a rhythmic looping figure with an equally repetitive guitar motif. But that’s plenty for Cave’s approach, which is closer to long recitals than to melodically polished vocal lines. And this is exactly where Cave is always at his strongest and most accessible. Time and again the artist’s personal feelings are draped in a paranoid, schizophrenic, piercing narration, which gives the listener the sense that Cave is literally losing his grip on sanity. At certain points on the album the band masterfully backs this up with stacked vocal melodies echoing in a phase delay, forming a unique kind of harmonizing and a form of support that works as an extra layer of the background soundscape, deepening that frightening, dark, no-way-out claustrophobic feeling even more. That feeling is a true reflection of the black times Cave’s soul was fighting its way through in this period.
There are eight tracks. All wildly different, all wildly unique and instantly recognizable. In this period the boys must have been suffering from a lack of sexual activity, because many of the verses drown in Cave’s sexist outbursts. The album’s lead song is The Carny. Simple as that. This is where Cave and the band are at their most expressive. The feelings they convey would move even the most sterile, frigid heart, crippled in its emotions! Here Cave is terrifying and unyielding as he strings together endless fields of death. Nick Cave transforms into a cabaret chamberlain, accompanied by a ghastly, repeating melody that surges through the atmosphere, its waves able to roar and foam up, then dissolve completely the next instant, while at the helm, at every moment, stands the stunningly authentic preacher Nick Cave. The Carny is wedged between the opening Sad Waters, where the embrace of the organ brings a gentle breeze of “Dylanisms,” and the title track, which are actually the quickest-to-win-you-over moments on the record, since they have melodically seductive lead motifs. The southern guitar pattern in Jack’s Shadow blasts you straight onto the scorching sun of the wild west, where the sun peels your own shadow off you and where soul and body, in self-realization, lay themselves completely bare, ready for total transformation. On “Your Funeral… My Trial,” Cave deepens his approach of shaping verses by twisting the Bible. Eroticism, death, damnation, the irony of self-realization, all interweave throughout the album. In Hard On For Love Cave is deliberately irritating and annoying, as his repeating dictates swell in intensity and end in an extremely noisy final crescendo. Next comes the calmer She Fell Away again, which is strongly tied to the relationship between Nick Cave and Anita Lane. This song stirs up feelings that are diametrically opposed to the track before it, Hard On For Love, since it emphasizes Cave’s subtle, deeper side of expression, magnified by pronounced control over the instruments. This folded-up soundscape is built (again) on minimalism, but with a rich layering of individual building blocks that create a dense harmony. On “Your Funeral… My Trial” too, the basic emotions are anguish and sadness. The closing Long Time Man is a cover of Tim Rose, which in the album’s final stretch even has a hint of rock’n’roll mischief, while Cave remains astonishingly down-to-earth right up to the album’s last second, 100% given over to his unique, recognizable, (relentlessly) fanatical sermon.
“Your Funeral… My Trial” is the first album with which Nick Cave finally cemented a firm, reliable platform on which he could keep building his career completely at ease. Eventually in the commercial sense too. “Your Funeral… My Trial” also marked the point where Cave settled into his vision, and the point from which it’s not hard to draw a line through Cave’s expressive direction all the way up to and including “Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!” (2008). “Your Funeral… My Trial,” an album that came about essentially without direction, without a pre-planned concept, thus achieved exactly the opposite effect. While the band was still waiting for the finished recordings to arrive from Melbourne to Berlin, so that everything would be ready for the release of “Kicking Against The Pricks,” the wait dragged on. It was the summer of 1986. Since Nick and company had nothing smarter to do, they set about writing and recording new material during this period. So “Your Funeral… My Trial” came together quite spontaneously, without planning and, of course, without expectations. Under the spell of playing through some of the originals covered on “Kicking Against The Pricks,” the band matured quickly, and “Your Funeral… My Trial” comes across as Nick Cave’s third studio album, the most fully realized and, up to that point, the most artistically defined in style.
Lineup
Nick Cave – vocals, Hammond
Blixa Bargeld – guitar
Mick Harvey – piano, guitar, drums, xylophone, organ
Barry Adamson – bass guitar
Thomas Wydler – drums
Production
Flood & Tony Cohen
Track List
1. Sad Waters
2. Carny
3. Your Funeral My Trial
4. Stranger Than Kindness
5. Jacks Shadow
6. Hard On For Love
7. She Fell Away
8. Long Time Man
