Artist: Nick Cave
Label: Mute Records
Released: 1984
Length: 43:37
Rating: 4/5
When The Birthday Party story ran its course, Nick Cave and guitarist Mick Harvey cooked up a new project in which Cave, on top of singing, also took over as bandleader, the main man the whole new venture hung on. It was the only logical move, because The Birthday Party had become a much, much too small room for Cave to realize all his ideas, which in their extravagance and eccentricity, and in the subtle provocation of the artist’s personal touch, often blew past the limits of common sense, hinted at outright weirdness and, with all their exploratory nerve, shamelessly threw open new musical horizons.
Why “From Her To Eternity” is such a powerful, convincing debut might be explained by the fact that Cave surrounded himself with a crew of available musicians who themselves came out of the artistic oddness of their own experimenting. They had nothing to lose and plenty to gain, a huge amount, if not everything. The supporting cast that backed Cave on the debut (the Bad Seeds weren’t a thing yet) was made up of Blixa Bargeld (guitar) from the experimental outfit Einstürzende Neubauten, Englishman Barry Adamson (bass), Australian Hugo Race (guitar) and Mick Harvey (drums, piano), who had jumped ship with Cave from The Birthday Party.
Nick Cave, a man of provocation, didn’t skimp on the fuel, and made an interesting move right from the starting line of his debut. To kick off his solo career, he went and covered Avalanche, originally by Leonard Cohen. Going by Cohen’s essence alone, Avalanche is a ferociously dark song at its core, which is hardly unusual for Cohen, but Cave managed to blacken that blackness even further. He instantly seizes the dominant role with his vocal take on stringing together the most desperate corners of the human soul, the ones that live in the most hidden nooks of a person’s character. The building blocks are laid out in a controlled, tasteful way, and the backing for Cave’s vocals is entirely subordinate to magnifying a deeply lived-in delivery that isn’t really singing at all, but a play of dictates, narratives and frenzied outbursts from a broken, battered individual backed into a corner, pushed to bizarre extremes! The musicians’ moves are minimalist, built on repeating basic patterns and kept under control just enough that Cave stays the main figure, dominant throughout. If they start raising more noise together, Cave only rises above them all the more in his neurotic excesses. That kind of moment is conjured up by Captain Fever!, which, together with Wings Off Flies, keeps only a fleeting memory of Cave’s punk-flavored Birthday Party eccentricity on the debut. One of Cave’s wittier pranks on the record is Well Of Misery, which unmistakably borrows its basic motif from the tradition of poetry by dockworkers and laborers, going back to the days when shipping ran on nothing but the power of the wind.
There are seven songs in total, but clear dividing lines run between them. Each one is a closed chapter in its own right, both in terms of the sermon in the verses and the musical mix itself. You can’t shake the feeling that the stringing together of darkness gets more and more intense as the album goes on. The title track and Saint Huck (a parody of the Mark Twain classic) deepen the personal chasm between the artist and society even further, while Cave drives his artistry to the very edge of the abyss with the closer A Box For Black Paul.
1984 was still a year when you could ski a slalom without your turns following a pre-drawn curve. With his debut, Cave pulled off exactly that. He made an incredibly unique album and showed where there was still untapped emptiness in musical expression. He turned the genre boundaries of popular styles on their head and squeezed out an album of total negation that sounds utterly one of a kind, instantly recognizable, and in all its peculiarities somehow magical and majestic. “From Her To Eternity” is one of the foundation stones for the development of the so-called independent indie rock scene, where absolutely every artistic outburst and excess is allowed. This is a cult classic of the alternative rock underground that sounds deadly serious and shocking, heart-rending even, on first listen, while on the flip side serving up a hefty helping of self-ironic mischief and goofing around, placed with refined subtlety in the tradition.
Lineup
Nick Cave – vocals, Hammond, harmonica
Hugo Race – guitar, backing vocals
Blixa Bargeld – guitar, backing vocals
Barry Adamson – bass, backing vocals
Mick Harvey – drums, backing vocals, piano
Production
Flood
Tracklist
1. Avalanche
2. Cabin Fever!
3. Well of Misery
4. From Her to Eternity
5. Saint Huck
6. Wings off Flies
7. Box for Black Paul
