Artist: Nick Cave
Label: Mute Records
Release: 1986
Length: 45:33
Rating: 4.5/5
“Kicking Against the Pricks”, the third album from Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds, is a collection of covers: vocal interpretations of songs by musicians who, one way or another, influenced Nick Cave or left their mark on him, shaping both how he understood musical art and the future growth of his own artistic identity. The Bad Seeds saw a change behind the drum kit. Thomas Wydler joined the lineup during “The Firstborn is Dead” tour.
With two albums in the bag that had already revealed their sound, the band had got audiences to the point where they pretty much knew what to expect from the third record. And that’s when they pulled off a great surprise move. They tackled songs they had listened to themselves back in their teenage years. For Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds, victory was guaranteed from the start. Cave himself, as a musical interpreter, is unique by a mile, truly one of a kind, impossible to replicate. Add to that the Bad Seeds’ complete attunement to Cave’s musical language, throw it all into the formula, and what comes out is an album that sounds like an original from the very first listen. In other words, they stripped the originals down and dressed them in the clothes of their own musical perception and authorial charisma. And that, it seems, is the only way an album like this makes any sense at all. It reminds me of a similar trick David Bowie pulled back in 1973 with his album “Pin Ups”.
That Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds aren’t afraid of or embarrassed by this kind of challenge is already proven by a similar detour two years earlier on the debut “From Her To Eternity” (1984), where the guys restructured L. Cohen’s original Avalanche in an utterly convincing way.
Aware of the new outfit the covers wear in his hands, Cave took even a bit more artistic freedom and played around with the original song titles, tweaking them slightly and so emphasizing the gap between original and cover, or, to put it another way, blurring the line even further between what’s original and what’s a cover. At times his interpretation veers way off from the original (e.g. The Hammer Song, a cover of the original by The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, or Hey Joe, a cover of the William Roberts original, or Sleeping Annaleah, a cover of the Tom Jones original).
The album gives the impression that the guys couldn’t wait to bury themselves in work at the time. They didn’t hold back on energy or ideas. They tried everything their creative imagination dictated. The sound is dense, and the songs at moments feel downright demonically wicked (I’m Gonna Kill That Woman, a cover of the John Lee Hooker original), then at other moments cold, distant and especially gloomy (The Singer, a cover of Johnny Cash’s The Folk Singer, the aforementioned Hey Joe, Muddy Water by Phil Rosenthal). Then, on top of all that, they went and took on All Tomorrow’s Parties by Velvet Underground, which borders on outright provocation. The original by that band is so special, stemming from the character of Velvet Underground themselves and the chemistry of the group captured in the studio, that it’s hard to imagine a version different from the original. For comparison, let me put it this way. I’ve never in my life heard a cover of a Pink Floyd original that was even worthy of the original. But Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds are cut from different cloth. At first they were genuinely a little scared. Respectfully and cautiously, they set the song up as a pure ballad, but when they tried to bring it into reality, it came out incredibly loud, with an extreme contrast between a choir of mighty manly vocals and the dissonant, dispersed wall created by the guitar. A chilling feeling of a final prayer.
On the other hand, there’s one more big novelty worth pointing out. When Nick Cave took on covers like Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart or By The Time I Get To Phoenix, he had to deal with a slightly altered way of singing. His punk barking or chopped-off frenetic outbursts, always with that deliberate dissonance of his own accent, simply weren’t enough; he had to look for something more in his expression. So in those songs, for example, the contrast is effectively brought out between Cave’s “conventional” approach (untested until then) and the chorus, where a breath of Cave’s irritating dilettantism creeps back in. In this conventional way of singing, the man discovered that his talent for vocal interpretation was still largely untapped, or rather unexplored, which had a major impact on his further development as well as on the look of Cave’s following albums.
“Kicking Against The Pricks” is an outstanding tribute to the musical legacy of the artists who grew especially close to the hearts of Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds. The mix of the popular primal roots of music, based on blues, southern gospel, country and Americana, with an emphasis on warped rock n’ roll, resulted in an album that bears the hallmark of a timeless work of art, with unique expressive power, outstanding cohesion and the perception of an always extremely sensitive Nick Cave and his backing crew. Even though it’s made up of covers, they’re so transformed that the album stands shoulder to shoulder with its younger and older siblings in Nick Cave’s discography, giving the feeling that it was built from original material. Even the composition of the air after you exhale is no longer the same as when you breathed in.
Lineup
Nick Cave – vocals
Mick Harvey – guitar, piano, backing vocals
Blixa Bsrgeld – guitar, backing vocals
Barry Adamson – bass guitar, backing vocals
Thomas Wydler – drums, percussion
GUEST MUSICIANS:
Dawn Cave – violin
Rowland S. Howard – vocals, keyboards, guitar
Tracy Pew – bass guitar
Huge Race – guitar
Production
Flood & Tony Cohen
Track list
1. Muddy Water
2. I’m Gonna Kill That Woman
3. Sleeping Annaleah
4. Long Black Veil
5. Hey Joe
6. Singer
7. All Tomorrow’s Parties
8. By The Time I Get To Pheonix
9. Hammer Song
10. Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart
11. Jesus Met The Woman At The Well
12. Carnival Is Over
