THE DUKE ON
ABATTOIR BLUES / THE LYRE
OF ORPHEUS
BY NICK CAVE AND THE BAD
SEEDS
ABATTOIR BLUES / THE LYRE
OF ORPHEUS
BY NICK CAVE AND THE BAD
SEEDS
In keeping with the unfathomable coolness hanging from The Duke
like heaven-scented tar, I arrived quite late to the party
advertised as “Nick Cave Is A Motherfucking Genius, Is What”.
I'd heard him do Stagger Lee on Later… With Jools Holland, and I
probably thought something along the lines of yeah, it’s very
funky and cool, but really, there’s no need for so many
motherfucks.
I’d heard the duet with Kylie Minogue, taken from the self-same
record, and had seen the video were Cave wanders about like some
dope-sick Lucifer as the angelic Kylie lies nostril-deep in
swamp water. It was all very atmospheric and morbid and so on,
and impressive as that fella in Pink Flamingos who sings through
his arsehole, but still, once the title came up and the promo
gave way to the latest Blur or some such, I forgot much of all
about it.
It was, in fact, Johnny Cash who convinced The Duke that Nick
Cave was obviously someone fit for suffocation by accolade.
Johnny phoned me up one night, thanking The Duke for having
recommended Cannibal Holocaust, and then said about how he
needed to repay the favour, so what I should do is grab some
records by Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds. I thought about it, and
then decided that what a fella should do is listen when Johnny
Cash offers a bit of advice, provided the advice isn’t about the
best way to spend the 1980’s.
Some might say that in actual fact what happened was The Duke
became mesmerised by Cash’s version of The Mercy Seat on
American III – Solitary Man, and that no phone-call of any sort
ever took place, to which I must staunchly retort along the
lines of “Shut your filthy face, bastard.”
Any the hell way, I soon picked up a handful of Cave’s musical
works, and set about depressing myself senseless with tale upon
tale of philandering, no good husbands and struggling with the
concept of God and murders committed in under-lit taverns and
all sorts of diabolical shenanigans.
Still, though, the last couple albums left me strangely under-
whelmed. No More Shall We Part, for example, was lyrically
blinding and musically impeccable, but it still seemed a tad one-
note, a bit monotonous, really, regardless of the baritone and
the piano and so on.
So what happened of recent times was that the new album,
Abattoir Blues / The Lyre Of Orpheus, a double, no less, arrived
in the post, and The Duke stared at it for quite some time,
observing the beautifully packaged discs, before sitting down on
the bed and flinging the disc entitled Abattoir Blues into the
player.
My jaw hit the fucking floor, is what.
You may or may not give a rancid wildebeest, but The Duke is
renowned in at least three bus-shelters for his Work In The
Field Of Miserable Songs. How I know something is nothing short
of brilliant, is that I measure the jealousy I feel coursing
through my caffeine-riddled veins. By the time track one, the
brilliant, stomping, crazed evangelist hollerings of Get Ready
For Love had come to an all too abrupt end, The Duke was
preparing to take his place as the protagonist in one of Cave’s
future ditties.
“It was back in 04 in The Northern Ireland,
The night ablaze with frenzied sirens,
Nick Cave staggers, drenched in blood and puke,
Since he done tried to mess with The Motherfucking Duke.”
Something like that. Something dark and disturbing and violent
all about how this Cave son of a bitch highlights The Duke’s
gross inadequacies.
Abattoir Blues is covered in the rash of genius, a blotchy
growth that stems from Cave’s first holler to the closing
strains of the terrifyingly surreal Fable Of The Brown Ape.
Lyrically, it’s amazing, and in so far as the “music” is
concerned, it’s the most arresting thing Cave and The Bad Seeds
have crafted since back in The Boatman’s Call. It’s not sweeping
melancholy we’re dealing with here, though. The record comes
across like a demented sermon conducted before a congregation
filled with the likes of those fucked-up nuns from The Devils.
It’s driven by barely-contained ecstasy, with the pounding drums
and gospel choirs and the almost-jazz squealing of fuzz-drenched
guitars.
I feel uncomfortable telling you folks that this right here is
the best record(s) Cave has ever made, the most consistently
brilliant, captivating work in that entire catalogue, right back
to the art-punk squawking of The Birthday Party. I’m scared you
might wanna say about “Oh, for Gods sakes, how can we trust this
sonna bitch? When was the last time he didn’t like something?
Every damn thing he yacks about, from the new Green Day to the
new Libertines, he wants to tell us it’s the best thing you ever
did listen to ever even ever.”
Well, shit, man, I just haven’t heard anything crap in a while.
You wanna blame somebody, blame the artistes in question.
Maybe they’ve all upped their game now that they realise they
might well starve to fucking death in, like, a week if folks get
the records off of The Kazaa.
Who wants to pay 15 quid for a pile of shit they can download in
a couple minutes?
Feel confident, though, in flinging your hard-earned dole money
in the direction of Abattoir Blues / The Lyre Of Orpheus.
The evidence can be found without too much trouble; Like when
Hiding All Away starts in the exact same manner as Simply The
Best by Tina Turner, before slipping and sliding and
transmogrifying and all sorts, coming on like Dylan at his Time
Out Of Mind filthiest (sonically speaking) and bastardising any
amount of swamp-rock sludge on its way to a breathless, frenzied
finale, Cave shouting about “There is a war coming! / Down from
above!”
Abattoir Blues also houses at least two of the kinda love songs
nobody else seems bothered to think much about. The kinda stuff
you listen to and you’re not even really sure if it is a love
song. It’s all a bit like that scene in Punch Drunk Love when
Adam Sandler tells Emily Watson that she’s so pretty he wants to
smash her face with a hammer. It’s a love that has an intensity
verging on pathological.
Messiah Ward, for example talks about “You are a force of
nature, dear / Your breath curls from your lips”, but then a
couple seconds later he’s suddenly going on about “They’re
bringing out the dead now / It’s easy to look away”, concluding
that “It’s been a strange, strange day.”
The stuff about this songwriter or that songwriter is a poet is
something flung about with discomforting ease nowadays. Sure,
there are the Shane MacGowan’s and the Morrissey’s and the Bob
Dylan’s of the world, the Cobain’s and the Bragg’s and the
Noble's and the Mitchell’s, but there are also a chart-load of
folks who manage to rhyme “Baby” with “Maybe” in a half-
competent manner and suddenly everyone sees Keats rising from
his grave and standing before their very skull-balls on the
MTVH-1 or whatever, maggots and decomposition replaced by the
spectres of sex and vulnerability.
Nick Cave, though, is one of very very few songwriters whose
lyrics stand up when the music and the blistering performances
are dashed brainless on a step and so the words must offer their
wares from only the cold printed page.
So many lines contained herein are enough to knock you three
feet in the opposite direction.
From There She Goes, My Beautiful World;
“I look at you, and you look at me and
Deep in our hearts know it,
That you weren’t much of a muse,
But then I weren’t much of a poet.”
And another, from the Cockney Rebel-esque Nature Boy;
“I was walking around the flower show like a leper,
Coming down with some kind of nervous hysteria,
When I saw you standing there, green eyes, black hair,
Up against the pink and purple wisteria”
Who the fuck would think of rhyming hysteria with wisteria? Who,
outside of some deranged fool sitting on a park-bench scribbling
frantically on a battered, nicotine stained A4 refill pad?
Abattoir Blues even on its own would be a monumental
achievement. That it’s packaged with nothing less than the
fucking breathtaking The Lyre Of Orpheus, that these are the
results of the same sessions, is evidence enough that Cave
should be poked with a stick and flung into a lake since he’s
obviously in league with Satan.
Maybe he is Satan, in which case not only has he the best tunes,
but the filthy diabolical hound sees fit even to wave the finest
lyrics in humanity at our faces, also.
The Lyre Of Orpheus begins with the wickedly funny title track,
a retelling of the Greek story by, I dunno, John Grisham or Zeus
or somebody, about Orpheus, the fella who creates this Lyre, the
music produced from which being so beautiful that it proves
homicidal in its gorgeosity.
He plays it to his wife;
“Look what I’ve made, cried Orpheus,
And he plucked a gentle note,
Eurydice’s eyes popped from their sockets,
And her tongue burst through her throat”
Anybody would assume that it’s high time he put the damn thing
down, but no, he carries on strumming through the fields, as
“Birdies detonated in the sky” and “Bunnies dashed their brains
out on the trees.”
Only when he annoys God (“A major player in heaven”, we are
informed), does he suffer for his actions, getting smacked with
a hammer and flung down a well into the underworld, where he
meets his recently tongue-burst wife;
“If you play that fucking thing down here,
I’ll stick it up your orifice!”
Maybe it’s all a big parable about the file-sharing, like in the
religious books when folks wanna talk about seeds and weeds and
farmers, but no, it’s about God, is what it is.
Maybe what happens is that a fella discovers Kazaa, and
downloads music that is nothing less than gorgeous, maybe even
the new Nick Cave album, but the cost upon his soul is immense.
Also, it makes folks die.
File Sharing Is Killing The Musicians For Fucks Sakes
Orpheus… is a slightly poppier, ever so slightly mellower affair
than Abattoir Blues, although the gospel choirs and so on are
all retained. It’s still just as mad as a bag of Coke-crazed
assholes, though, and just as much fun for the lonely gentleman.
Babe, You Turn Me On has a title reminiscent of Bob Dylan, but
its spoken word verses are closer to the aforementioned Late,
Great Mr Cash. Even though Johnny would be unlikely to write
lyrics like,
“Now the nightingale sings to you,
And raises up the ante,
I put one hand on your round, ripe heart,
And the other down your panties.”
Easy Money tells of a fella (perhaps Cave himself), meeting a
vagrant in the park and feeling guilty as hell on account of his
financial security.
“Money, man, it is a bitch,
The poor, they spoil it for the rich”
What the point to be made might be, with regards this new record
by Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds, is that whether you see it as a
coherent whole, or as two albums released in the same case, like
maybe one of those Beach Boys compilations with Smiley Smile and
Best Of The Beach Boys – Surfin’ California shoved on there,
whatever way you wanna approach it, there are some “constants”,
some of the old “facts” that remain unchallenged, like stuff
about how humans need to breathe, most likely, as opposed to
other sorts of “facts” like the sun revolves around the earth,
or Sgt Pepper is the best Beatles record.
The facts of the motherfucking case are thus;
Lyrically, this is Cave’s best album.
Musically, this is the best stuff The Bad Seeds have ever
crafted.
And, ultimately, if this is indeed two albums, then The Duke has
even more reason for to seriously consider nailing Nick Cave to
a plank of wood and demanding the knowledge he so obviously
possesses regarding the invocation of the sublime.
Thanks Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, you pack of fucking shits.
Thanks folks.
Drop The Duke A Line
like heaven-scented tar, I arrived quite late to the party
advertised as “Nick Cave Is A Motherfucking Genius, Is What”.
I'd heard him do Stagger Lee on Later… With Jools Holland, and I
probably thought something along the lines of yeah, it’s very
funky and cool, but really, there’s no need for so many
motherfucks.
I’d heard the duet with Kylie Minogue, taken from the self-same
record, and had seen the video were Cave wanders about like some
dope-sick Lucifer as the angelic Kylie lies nostril-deep in
swamp water. It was all very atmospheric and morbid and so on,
and impressive as that fella in Pink Flamingos who sings through
his arsehole, but still, once the title came up and the promo
gave way to the latest Blur or some such, I forgot much of all
about it.
It was, in fact, Johnny Cash who convinced The Duke that Nick
Cave was obviously someone fit for suffocation by accolade.
Johnny phoned me up one night, thanking The Duke for having
recommended Cannibal Holocaust, and then said about how he
needed to repay the favour, so what I should do is grab some
records by Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds. I thought about it, and
then decided that what a fella should do is listen when Johnny
Cash offers a bit of advice, provided the advice isn’t about the
best way to spend the 1980’s.
Some might say that in actual fact what happened was The Duke
became mesmerised by Cash’s version of The Mercy Seat on
American III – Solitary Man, and that no phone-call of any sort
ever took place, to which I must staunchly retort along the
lines of “Shut your filthy face, bastard.”
Any the hell way, I soon picked up a handful of Cave’s musical
works, and set about depressing myself senseless with tale upon
tale of philandering, no good husbands and struggling with the
concept of God and murders committed in under-lit taverns and
all sorts of diabolical shenanigans.
Still, though, the last couple albums left me strangely under-
whelmed. No More Shall We Part, for example, was lyrically
blinding and musically impeccable, but it still seemed a tad one-
note, a bit monotonous, really, regardless of the baritone and
the piano and so on.
So what happened of recent times was that the new album,
Abattoir Blues / The Lyre Of Orpheus, a double, no less, arrived
in the post, and The Duke stared at it for quite some time,
observing the beautifully packaged discs, before sitting down on
the bed and flinging the disc entitled Abattoir Blues into the
player.
My jaw hit the fucking floor, is what.
You may or may not give a rancid wildebeest, but The Duke is
renowned in at least three bus-shelters for his Work In The
Field Of Miserable Songs. How I know something is nothing short
of brilliant, is that I measure the jealousy I feel coursing
through my caffeine-riddled veins. By the time track one, the
brilliant, stomping, crazed evangelist hollerings of Get Ready
For Love had come to an all too abrupt end, The Duke was
preparing to take his place as the protagonist in one of Cave’s
future ditties.
“It was back in 04 in The Northern Ireland,
The night ablaze with frenzied sirens,
Nick Cave staggers, drenched in blood and puke,
Since he done tried to mess with The Motherfucking Duke.”
Something like that. Something dark and disturbing and violent
all about how this Cave son of a bitch highlights The Duke’s
gross inadequacies.
Abattoir Blues is covered in the rash of genius, a blotchy
growth that stems from Cave’s first holler to the closing
strains of the terrifyingly surreal Fable Of The Brown Ape.
Lyrically, it’s amazing, and in so far as the “music” is
concerned, it’s the most arresting thing Cave and The Bad Seeds
have crafted since back in The Boatman’s Call. It’s not sweeping
melancholy we’re dealing with here, though. The record comes
across like a demented sermon conducted before a congregation
filled with the likes of those fucked-up nuns from The Devils.
It’s driven by barely-contained ecstasy, with the pounding drums
and gospel choirs and the almost-jazz squealing of fuzz-drenched
guitars.
I feel uncomfortable telling you folks that this right here is
the best record(s) Cave has ever made, the most consistently
brilliant, captivating work in that entire catalogue, right back
to the art-punk squawking of The Birthday Party. I’m scared you
might wanna say about “Oh, for Gods sakes, how can we trust this
sonna bitch? When was the last time he didn’t like something?
Every damn thing he yacks about, from the new Green Day to the
new Libertines, he wants to tell us it’s the best thing you ever
did listen to ever even ever.”
Well, shit, man, I just haven’t heard anything crap in a while.
You wanna blame somebody, blame the artistes in question.
Maybe they’ve all upped their game now that they realise they
might well starve to fucking death in, like, a week if folks get
the records off of The Kazaa.
Who wants to pay 15 quid for a pile of shit they can download in
a couple minutes?
Feel confident, though, in flinging your hard-earned dole money
in the direction of Abattoir Blues / The Lyre Of Orpheus.
The evidence can be found without too much trouble; Like when
Hiding All Away starts in the exact same manner as Simply The
Best by Tina Turner, before slipping and sliding and
transmogrifying and all sorts, coming on like Dylan at his Time
Out Of Mind filthiest (sonically speaking) and bastardising any
amount of swamp-rock sludge on its way to a breathless, frenzied
finale, Cave shouting about “There is a war coming! / Down from
above!”
Abattoir Blues also houses at least two of the kinda love songs
nobody else seems bothered to think much about. The kinda stuff
you listen to and you’re not even really sure if it is a love
song. It’s all a bit like that scene in Punch Drunk Love when
Adam Sandler tells Emily Watson that she’s so pretty he wants to
smash her face with a hammer. It’s a love that has an intensity
verging on pathological.
Messiah Ward, for example talks about “You are a force of
nature, dear / Your breath curls from your lips”, but then a
couple seconds later he’s suddenly going on about “They’re
bringing out the dead now / It’s easy to look away”, concluding
that “It’s been a strange, strange day.”
The stuff about this songwriter or that songwriter is a poet is
something flung about with discomforting ease nowadays. Sure,
there are the Shane MacGowan’s and the Morrissey’s and the Bob
Dylan’s of the world, the Cobain’s and the Bragg’s and the
Noble's and the Mitchell’s, but there are also a chart-load of
folks who manage to rhyme “Baby” with “Maybe” in a half-
competent manner and suddenly everyone sees Keats rising from
his grave and standing before their very skull-balls on the
MTVH-1 or whatever, maggots and decomposition replaced by the
spectres of sex and vulnerability.
Nick Cave, though, is one of very very few songwriters whose
lyrics stand up when the music and the blistering performances
are dashed brainless on a step and so the words must offer their
wares from only the cold printed page.
So many lines contained herein are enough to knock you three
feet in the opposite direction.
From There She Goes, My Beautiful World;
“I look at you, and you look at me and
Deep in our hearts know it,
That you weren’t much of a muse,
But then I weren’t much of a poet.”
And another, from the Cockney Rebel-esque Nature Boy;
“I was walking around the flower show like a leper,
Coming down with some kind of nervous hysteria,
When I saw you standing there, green eyes, black hair,
Up against the pink and purple wisteria”
Who the fuck would think of rhyming hysteria with wisteria? Who,
outside of some deranged fool sitting on a park-bench scribbling
frantically on a battered, nicotine stained A4 refill pad?
Abattoir Blues even on its own would be a monumental
achievement. That it’s packaged with nothing less than the
fucking breathtaking The Lyre Of Orpheus, that these are the
results of the same sessions, is evidence enough that Cave
should be poked with a stick and flung into a lake since he’s
obviously in league with Satan.
Maybe he is Satan, in which case not only has he the best tunes,
but the filthy diabolical hound sees fit even to wave the finest
lyrics in humanity at our faces, also.
The Lyre Of Orpheus begins with the wickedly funny title track,
a retelling of the Greek story by, I dunno, John Grisham or Zeus
or somebody, about Orpheus, the fella who creates this Lyre, the
music produced from which being so beautiful that it proves
homicidal in its gorgeosity.
He plays it to his wife;
“Look what I’ve made, cried Orpheus,
And he plucked a gentle note,
Eurydice’s eyes popped from their sockets,
And her tongue burst through her throat”
Anybody would assume that it’s high time he put the damn thing
down, but no, he carries on strumming through the fields, as
“Birdies detonated in the sky” and “Bunnies dashed their brains
out on the trees.”
Only when he annoys God (“A major player in heaven”, we are
informed), does he suffer for his actions, getting smacked with
a hammer and flung down a well into the underworld, where he
meets his recently tongue-burst wife;
“If you play that fucking thing down here,
I’ll stick it up your orifice!”
Maybe it’s all a big parable about the file-sharing, like in the
religious books when folks wanna talk about seeds and weeds and
farmers, but no, it’s about God, is what it is.
Maybe what happens is that a fella discovers Kazaa, and
downloads music that is nothing less than gorgeous, maybe even
the new Nick Cave album, but the cost upon his soul is immense.
Also, it makes folks die.
File Sharing Is Killing The Musicians For Fucks Sakes
Orpheus… is a slightly poppier, ever so slightly mellower affair
than Abattoir Blues, although the gospel choirs and so on are
all retained. It’s still just as mad as a bag of Coke-crazed
assholes, though, and just as much fun for the lonely gentleman.
Babe, You Turn Me On has a title reminiscent of Bob Dylan, but
its spoken word verses are closer to the aforementioned Late,
Great Mr Cash. Even though Johnny would be unlikely to write
lyrics like,
“Now the nightingale sings to you,
And raises up the ante,
I put one hand on your round, ripe heart,
And the other down your panties.”
Easy Money tells of a fella (perhaps Cave himself), meeting a
vagrant in the park and feeling guilty as hell on account of his
financial security.
“Money, man, it is a bitch,
The poor, they spoil it for the rich”
What the point to be made might be, with regards this new record
by Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds, is that whether you see it as a
coherent whole, or as two albums released in the same case, like
maybe one of those Beach Boys compilations with Smiley Smile and
Best Of The Beach Boys – Surfin’ California shoved on there,
whatever way you wanna approach it, there are some “constants”,
some of the old “facts” that remain unchallenged, like stuff
about how humans need to breathe, most likely, as opposed to
other sorts of “facts” like the sun revolves around the earth,
or Sgt Pepper is the best Beatles record.
The facts of the motherfucking case are thus;
Lyrically, this is Cave’s best album.
Musically, this is the best stuff The Bad Seeds have ever
crafted.
And, ultimately, if this is indeed two albums, then The Duke has
even more reason for to seriously consider nailing Nick Cave to
a plank of wood and demanding the knowledge he so obviously
possesses regarding the invocation of the sublime.
Thanks Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, you pack of fucking shits.
Thanks folks.
Drop The Duke A Line
