The Boatman’s Call

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A more cinematic focus would dictate the majority of their 90s output, moving through 92’s Henry’s Dream(which featured some of Cave’s most assured and sprawling lyrical compositions) and 94’s Let Love In, both of which bought The Bad Seeds a wealth of new focus from the critical mainstream.

Celebrated as the band's most starkly moving work, key tracks include the single 'Into My Arms' and 'People Ain't No Good', featured in the soundtrack to Shrek 2. Stripped down and grown up--though still ghoulish and grave--Cave the storyteller has turned into something of a vampire Bruce Springsteen. or singer PJ Harvey, with whom he had a brief relationship around that time (as referenced in "West Country Girl", "Black Hair" and "Green Eyes"). Each album has been re-mastered (overseen by Mick Harvey, former Bad Seed and founder member), and all album artwork reflects the original release from the cover to the printed inner sleeves.He has begun to find a quiet grace, and perhaps even beauty, past all the darkness that's long consumed him. The video proved an evocative forecast of their troubled but passionate affair, which disintegrated after just a few months together. and " Black Hair" have invisibly possessed my sub-conscious - I wake up with these tunes and lyrics in head. With only the sparest accompaniment--often just a piano or organ, light percussion and violin (courtesy of Dirty Three's Warren Ellis)- -Cave employs traditional folk song structure and simplicity to weave tales saddened less through tragedy than through emptiness. A album about the despair of breaking up, this album is one that suits a certain mood, at 48 years old I found myself in similar situation.

But few could have guessed that Cave would bookend this period with what remains his most tender and honest record; a naked account of love and loss created in a period of personal and stylistic transition. People Ain't No Good" is an especial work of genius - without meaning to give too much away, the last verse in particular is both devastating and (almost) funny in its bleakness.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. I've given it four stars because some songs just don't quite gel with me - in "Lime Tree Arbour" I find the piano hook a little lazy (contrast with "Love Letter" from "No More Shall We Part"), and I find the voice-over in "Green Eyes" a bit gimmicky.

Cave performed "Into My Arms" at the 1997 funeral of INXS vocalist Michael Hutchence, an old friend from Cave's youth, and requested that the TV cameras be shut off for his performance out of respect for Hutchence. Cave opens his heart from the outset, the song beginning with the stunning line of "I don't believe in an interventionist God / But I know, darling, that you do". His brief dalliance with Polly Harvey, whom he became infatuated with after their Henry Lee duet on Murder Ballads, is referenced on Green Eyes, Black Hair and the more direct West Country Girl. It says a great deal about Cave as a person, and The Bad Seeds as a band, that they are willing to stare down these deeply personal situations within full view of the public gaze; to wrestle some kind of artistic redemption from the jaws of emotional defeat.The religious motifs of Brompton Oratory, an album highlight, and There Is a Kingdom lend an air of a man coming to terms with his place in the world, with subtle churchy murmurs over drum machines. Amid the ashes of a world unable to exorcise its demons, Nick actually finds love; a strange, twisted, doomed love, perhaps--but love nevertheless. Cleary uncomfortable about the process of spinning one’s own feelings into poetic form he has often addressed the album as “a big heroic melodrama out of a bog-standard rejection. Behind the scenes, several issues had aligned in Cave’s life; a traumatic break-up, a second stint in rehab for a still persistent heroin addiction, and, most famously, a passionate but swiftly extinguished love-affair.

As Cave stated, this was ‘the sort of record I’ve been wanting to make for years […] a record which is slow from beginning to end… Very sparse, very raw and beautiful. Recording for the album began at Sarm West Studios in London, United Kingdom in mid-1996, with "The Garden Duet", one of the album's outtakes, being the first song recorded. The A-Side: We are the world's most popular and respected album listening event with satellites in four continents. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Having collaborated previously on the Murder Balladsfolk-cover ‘Henry Lee’, the pair had hit it off on the video shoot for that very song – an erotic, bare-bones scene which found the two-singers wrapped around one-another, locked deep in lustful stares and lyrical whispers.Cave urged the group to embellish as little as possible, seeking to maintain the primary focus on his lyrics and stark solo piano playing, allowing their naked and vulnerable emotional qualities to shine through unvarnished. These ruptures in his life would not only influence the lyrical direction of this next album, but would completely remould The Bad Seed’s musical role, stripping them back to a level of restraint and sparseness which, at this point, was new and scary territory. Its sincerity feels all the more poignant following the band’s latest full-length, 2016’s Skeleton Tree, written and recorded in the wake of the tragic and sudden death of Cave’s teenage son Arthur. After a career spent tearing down the world with horror and disgust, Nick Cave finally sounds ready to start rebuilding from scratch. Into My Arms is a love song so perfect you wonder why any other composition of its kind bothers to go up against a ballad that all others should rightfully refer to as ‘Sir’.