Tag Archives: Blixa Bargeld

Teho Teardo – Grief Is The Thing With Feathers (Specula album, 2019)

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Blixa Bargeld and Balanescu Quartet collaborator Teho Teardo has charted a singular course through electronic, classical and industrial music since he first emerged with a self-released cassette album in 1985. His approach to works for strings and sound design can be linked back to his early days as an Italian punk, his music containing a visceral weight coupled with a blunt, almost antagonistic command of the loud-quiet-loud dynamic.

His latest work is arguably the most complete realisation of that vision. Inspired by Max Porter’s book Grief Is The Thing With Feathers and used in its subsequent stage adaptation by Enda Walsh, the eight pieces here chart the narrative of a crow and his family as he struggles to cope following the loss of his partner and the need to raise his two chicks by himself.

Here we find Teardo offering up recurring passages of staccato cello that carry the sonic attack and challenge of heavy metal guitars, blended with jangly guitars, dramatic percussion and intense violin, best exemplified by standout moments like ‘London Offered Us Possible Mothers’. Elsewhere, the interplay between processed wind instruments and modular synths on ‘Hop Sniff And Tackle’ creates a nauseating, ominous tension wherein a serene string section toward the end is just about the only relief from a darkness as intense as a crow’s feathers.

Grief Is The Thing With Feathers by Teho Teardo was released in March 2019 by Specula.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2019 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – The Boatman’s Call (Mute album, 1997)

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nctbs_boatmans

I was tempted to write this review with just one word. That word is ‘beautiful’. Written by Nick Cave at exactly the same time as Murder Ballads, these songs were written with simplicity in mind, and as such the majority of these superior compositions feature a stripped back Bad Seeds, and a heavy dose of piano. The contrast with Murder Ballads could not be greater, taking a deeply intimate, romantic and often spiritual tone. No one dies here, one may be relieved to know.

But maybe a little part of Nick Cave died in order to make a collection of songs; that part of him would be the preacher, the aggressor, the dervish spirit howling and caterwauling over a maelstrom of sensational music. It genuinely isn’t a criticism – I happen to think that this is among Cave’s finest work. Everything about The Boatman’s Call is black and white – the Johnny Cash-esque Anton Cobijn photo of a particularly harrowed Nick Cave on the front cover, through the predominance of the piano keys across the LP, through to the downright clarity of Cave’s songwriting. What’s most clear about The Boatman’s Call is the often obvious theme of these songs, for this is Nick Cave’s most directly personal collection of songs, from the post-PJ Harvey reflectiveness of the quirky folk leanings of ‘West Country Girl’ and ‘Black Hair’, through to his ruminations on his failed marriage on ‘People Just Ain’t No Good’ or ‘Where Do We Go Now But Nowhere’.

However, aside from a fair amount of openness from our tortured songsmith, The Boatman’s Call also features two generally beautiful love songs – ‘Lime Tree Arbour’ and ‘Brompton Oratory’. Like much of the album, these have a musical accompaniment from The Bad Seeds that is directly informed by subtle jazz but the latter also features a perfectly twee Casio rhythm that sounds like it survived from Cave’s original demo. The latter describes a trip made by Cave to Kensington’s famous, and imposing, landmark, and finds Cave wishing he were one of the stone apostles therein, just so that he wouldn’t have to deal with his muse’s intense beauty. It perfectly captures the intensity of romance’s first flourishes, that feeling of not being able to cope anymore. ‘Lime Tree Arbour’ is just mystical and beautiful, its waterside setting making me think of Murder Ballads‘ ‘Where The Wild Roses Grow’, with all the same romantic longings, just none of the death; an alternative ending, perhaps?

The album features the full Bad Seeds line-up (Mick Harvey, Blixa Bargeld, Thomas Wydler, the late Conway Savage, Martyn P. Casey, Jim Sclavunos and Warren Ellis), albeit in controlled doses, and benefits from an unusually restrained production job from Flood, who also produced the oft-slated U2 album Pop the same year. The style of production is subtle and delicate, and Cave’s vocal is dominant in the mix, casting a personal, intimate shadow over proceedings. It feels like a one-to-one connection between the narrator and sympathetic listener. Warren Ellis’ violin is also an important element here, receiving greater space in the mix than it had been given previously, bestowing the gypsy folk of ‘West Country Girl’ with a rabidly maudlin edge. His work on ‘Idiot Prayer’, perhaps the track closest to a classic Bad Seeds ballad sees his violin overtaking Blix’s fuzzy guitar as lead instrument, a sign of the sea change that was to come.

I have my own, highly personal reasons, for counting this among my favourite albums of all time. Suffice it to say, many years on, it’s the more miserable tracks here – like ‘Far From Me’ – that I find myself reflecting on when I think of that period in my life. ‘Can’t you find somebody else / That you can ring and tell?’, Cave sings on that penultimate, delicately poignant song. Wise words that I wish my younger self had heeded.

First published 2004; edited 2018.

(c) 2018 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

ANBB – Ret Marut Handshake (Raster-Noton EP, 2010)

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ANBB 'Ret Marut Handshake' artwork

raster-noton | r-n 120 | 21/06/2010

ANBB is a collaboration between Alva Noto (electronic musician and artist Carsten Nicolai, head of the Raster-Noton imprint and one half of Diamond Version) and Blixa Bargeld. Bargeld is the stimmung of cult Berlin noise-merchants Einstürzende Neubauten who has recently developed processed spoken-word performances (‘rede‘) into his repertoire alongside his day job fashioning unexpected sounds from guitars and detritus in Neubaten. Nicolai on the other hand is the poster boy for glitch-based electronics, notable for works based on ‘forced error’. Before Diamond Version, Nicolai’s collaboration with Byetone, Mute and Raster-Noton collaborated on the Short Circuit festival in 2011; back in 2010 though, ANBB could perhaps be seen as an early precursor to greater engagement between the two labels, even though Bargeld has all but severed ties with his former label home.

The combination of two mavericks on the Ret Marut Handshake EP finds Bargeld’s voice surprisingly suited to Nicolai’s cracked electronics, serving as a tantalising taster of the full-length album which this ultimately supported, Mimikry. This mini-album / EP is named after Ret Marut, a shady, chameleon figure (actor, writer, activist and a pseudonym of the author B. Traven) that Bargeld found intriguing from his childhood years onward.

Neubauten releases over the years have made it their business to explore found sounds and sounds conjured from industrial equipment; Bargeld’s guitar was never played so much as abused on early releases and drum kits were constructed from nothing quite so pedestrian as actual drums. Later releases added strings and sensitivity, finding beauty in detritus. But generally, electronics didn’t feature, were almost eschewed, making Neubauten releases all the more appealing for their relatively ‘organic’ development. Imagining Bargeld intoning his wonderfully expressive words over a bed of electronic sounds wouldn’t have crossed my mind, but I was nevertheless intrigued by this collaboration.

In an interview with The Wire, Bargeld explained how Nicolai’s approach initially baffled him. The fifth track on the release ‘I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground’ (a cover of the traditional American folk song) found Bargeld needing to explain the chords to the piece which Nicolai then had to translate into frequencies for them to make sense in his idiosyncratic soundworld. That track is playful, and possibly just a bit of fun, finding Blixa getting all shaky and rock ‘n’ roll while a muted palette of bassy tones and scratchy beats occupies the background. Something about this screams that Bargeld possibly wasn’t even aware of being recorded, as it has the feel of him musing away to himself throughout. The EP also includes a version of Harry Nilsson’s tender ‘One’. ‘One is the loneliest number that you ever know,‘ sings Bargeld on this fragile ballad, his voice taking on a warmth and mournful quality while a gentle web of echoing tones, speaking clock pulses and sketchy non-beats heighten the muted atmosphere. Rarely has a clash between two collaborators from different oeuvres been so stark, and the results so good.

Anyone remotely familiar with Nicolai’s soundworld will be familiar with the fractured, detuned beats, clicks and hisses that characterise his rhythms, those off-centre beats being combined with minimal synth tones, melodic clusters and drones. The sonic tapestry provides the backdrop to Bargeld’s distorted vocal, which veers from half-sung intonations to semi-rapped stream-of-conscious slews of words, everyone single sibilant utterance and word pronounced with a consideration every bit as calculated as Nicolai’s soundworld. At times Bargeld’s words are chopped, spliced and layered, as on the opening title track of the EP. ‘Electricity Is Fiction’ is like a more or less conventional electro track just with a more skittish beat, Bargeld delivering a lecture on what electricity is; a bit like Kraftwerk‘s ‘Radioactivity’ subjected to a high voltage current, whereupon their considered, clean electronics become wildly out of control. The darkest piece here, ‘Bernsteinzimmer’ is a dark, noirish soundtrack-style piece. Buzzing drones, violin sounds and thudding bass drum, give this a bleak cinematic feel; clipped, whispered sibilant vocals in the background and Blixa delivering a stately, towering vocal performance.

First published 2012; re-edited 2015.

(c) 2015 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – The Boatman’s Call (Mute Records album, 1997)

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Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds 'The Boatman's Call' LP artwork

mute records | lp/cd/c stumm142 | 03/03/1997

I was tempted to write this review with just one word. That word is ‘beautiful’. Allegedly written by Nick Cave at exactly the same time as Murder Ballads, these songs were written with simplicity in mind, and as such the majority of these superior compositions feature a stripped back Bad Seeds, and a heavy dose of piano. The contrast with Murder Ballads could not be greater, taking a deeply intimate, romantic and often spiritual tone. No-one dies here, one may be relieved to know.

But maybe a little part of Nick Cave died in order to make a collection of songs; that part of him was the preacher, the aggressor, the dervish spirit howling and caterwauling over a maelstrom of sensational music, and that character wouldn’t emerge again until the later Grinderman project. It genuinely isn’t a criticism – I happen to think that The Boatman’s Call is among Cave’s finest work. Everything about album is black and white – the Johnny Cash-esque Anton Cobijn photo of a particularly troubled Nick Cave on the front cover, through the predominance of the piano keys across the LP, through to the downright clarity of Cave’s songwriting. What’s most clear about The Boatman’s Call is the often obvious theme of these songs, for this is Nick Cave’s most directly personal collection of ideas, from the post-PJ Harvey reflectiveness of the quirky folk leanings of ‘West Country Girl’ and ‘Black Hair’, through to his ruminations on his failed marriage on ‘People Just Ain’t No Good’ or ‘Where Do We Go Now But Nowhere’.

However, aside from a fair amount of openness from our tortured songsmith, The Boatman’s Call also features two genuinely beautiful love songs – ‘Lime Tree Arbour’ and ‘Brompton Oratory’. Like much of the album, these have a musical accompaniment from The Bad Seeds that is directly informed by subtle jazz but the latter also features a perfectly twee Casio rhythm that sounds like it survived from Cave’s original demo. The latter describes a trip made by Cave to Kensington’s famous, and imposing, landmark, and finds Cave wishing he were one of the stone apostles therein, just so that he wouldn’t have to deal with his muse’s intense beauty. It perfectly captures the intensity of romance’s first flourishes, that feeling of not being able to cope anymore. ‘Lime Tree Arbour’ is just mystical and beautiful, its waterside setting making me think of Murder Ballads’ ‘Where The Wild Roses Grow’, with all the same romantic longings, just none of the death; an alternative ending, perhaps?

The album features the full Bad Seeds line-up (Mick Harvey, Blixa Bargeld, Thomas Wydler, Conway Savage, Martyn P. Casey, Jim Sclavunos and Warren Ellis), albeit in controlled doses, and benefits from an unusually restrained production job from Flood, who also produced the oft-slated U2 album Pop the same year. The style of production is subtle and delicate, and Cave’s vocal is dominant in the mix, casting a personal, intimate shadow over proceedings, making this the closest Cave has yet come to the introspection of Leonard Cohen. It feels like a one-to-one connection between the narrator and sympathetic listener. Warren Ellis’ violin is also an important element here, receiving greater space in the mix than previously, bestowing the gypsy folk of ‘West Country Girl’ with a rabidly maudlin edge. His work on ‘Idiot Prayer’, perhaps the track closest to a classic Bad Seeds ballad sees his violin overtaking Blixa’s fuzzy guitar as lead instrument, a sign of the sea change that was to come.

I have my own, highly personal reasons, for counting this among my favourite albums of all time. Suffice it to say, seven years on, it’s the more miserable tracks here – like the personally chord-resounding ‘Far From Me’ – that I find myself reflecting on of that period in my life. ‘Can’t you find somebody else / That you can ring and tell?‘, Cave sings on that penultimate, delicately poignant song. Those would become wise words for my younger self.

 

I was minded to re-post this review after hearing the lead single from this album, the delicate ‘Into My Arms’ at the end of Richard Curtis’s About Time movie. It’s been a long time since I heard this album and for the personal reasons alluded to above, it’s one that I now find relatively hard to contemplate listening to. In the movie, Cave’s track is chosen by the dying Bill Nighy as the soundtrack for his own wake, lending the track a greater poignancy than perhaps Cave ever even intended.

A couple of years ago someone at Mute sent me a link to a YouTube rip of some songs that were recorded for The Boatman’s Call sessions but which have never surfaced except for on an expensive bootleg CD. The tracks that didn’t make it to the final album were every bit as perfect as the ones that were on the final release, a telling testament to the furious level of output that Cave was enjoying in this period of his life. The twin albums of Murder Ballads and The Boatman’s Call thus stand as one of the most pivotal periods in Cave’s career as a songwriter, marking a crossing place, a transition and the start of his wider public acceptance as one of the finest lyricists of our generation.

Track list:

lp/c/cd:

A1. / 1. Into My Arms
A2. / 2. Lime-Tree Arbour
A3. / 3. People Ain’t No Good
A4. / 4. Brompton Oratory
A5. / 5. There Is A Kingdom
A6. / 6. Where Do We Go Now But Nowhere?
B1. / 7. (Are You) The One That I’ve Been Waiting For?
B2. / 8. West Country Girl
B3. / 9. Black Hair
B4. / 10. Idiot Prayer
B5. / 11. Far From Me
B6. / 12. Green Eyes

For information on other formats go to: http://www.discogs.com/master/view/18393

First published 2004; re-edited 2014. This review focusses on the 1997 original release, not the remastered, expanded 2011 edition.

(c) 2014 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Anita Lane – Dirty Pearl (Mute Records album, 1993)

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Anita Lane 'Dirty Pearl' LP artwork

mute records | lp/cd stumm81 | 10/1993

Dirty Pearl is a rag-bag collection of newly-recorded Anita Lane tracks produced by Mick Harvey as well as older material, the entire Dirty Sings EP and collaborations with Die Haut, Einstürzende Neubauten, Barry Adamson and The Birthday Party. The album is as much a collection of Lane’s work as it is a showcase for the seemingly unlikely cross-pollination of scenes that emerged when The Birthday Party moved from Australia to the UK, followed by a brief and fortuitous sojourn in Berlin; that productive Kreuzberg stop-over was responsible for Nick Cave‘s Bad Seeds being swelled by the likes of Neubauten’s Blixa Bargeld and Die Haut’s Thomas Wydler, as well as some of Cave’s most inventive and inspired early musical work.

The collection covers the period 1982 to 1993 and presents the tracks in reverse chronological order. Overall, the compilation shows just how integral Lane was to the whole scene that formed between London and Berlin in the mid-Eighties, with characters such as Chrislo Haas and Adamson appearing on various tracks. As Nick Cave’s girlfriend and muse, Lane co-wrote a number of The Birthday Party’s songs, including the likes of ‘Dead Joe’, and was credited as a founding member of Cave’s subsequent Bad Seeds though her participation in the group was never exactly clear. What’s also immediately apparent from this collection is just how little music Lane has herself released – over half of Dirty Pearl was already released by the time this compilation was released, and Lane would only come to release her first (and to date only) ‘proper’ LP in 2002 with Sex O’Clock. Whilst Dirty Pearl provides a comprehensive overview of Lane’s music, one notable omission is 1991’s collaboration with Adamson on the excellent cover of Lee Hazlewood’s ‘These Boots Were Made For Walking’ which Adamson crafted for his Delusion soundtrack.

Opening track (and therefore most recent) ‘Jesus Almost Got Me’ is a countrified, Triffids-esque song of drunkenness, cruel love and regret, beautifully carried forward on Harvey’s sensitive drumming and ‘Evil’ Graham Lee’s genteel slide guitar. Immersed in the background are spirals of grainy feedback and some lovely vocal harmonies from Harvey. ‘Jesus Almost Got Me’ has a tired, resigned quality to it. In contrast, ‘The Groovy Guru’ is a funky, psychedelic trip, filled with wild face-melting guitar and wayward organ creating a vibe that felt about twenty-five years old too late, the lyrics describing a sort of pervy Cassanova character with a number of Satanic traits.

The cover of Marvin Gaye’s ‘Sexual Healing’ was produced by Mick Harvey with artist Johannes Beck and Sven Röhrig, finding Lane cooing girlishly over a sick, phasing breakbeat, shimmering vibes from Barry Adamson and some leaden (and less-than-romantic) backing vocals from Beck and Moritz Wolpert. At times Lane sings with a strained needfulness that can feel quite uncomfortable at times, but it’s quite hard to think of this as being too serious. Both ‘Blume’ (from Neubauten’s Tabula Rasa LP) and ‘Subterranean World (How Long…?)’ (from Die Haut’s Head On) highlight how well Lane’s voice matches Blixa Bargeld’s distinctive own. Bargeld’s transition from the howling, shredded vocal style displayed on Neubaten’s earliest material to the sensitive, half-spoken, almost Scott Walker-esque voice of their later material is continually surprising, and that softer side shines through on these two songs. ‘Subterranean World’, with its duet chorus of ‘How long have we known each other now?‘ brings to mind those clips in romantic films where couples explain to camera how long they have been together, except that by the end of this darkly humorous song Lane and Bargeld decide that they’ve never actually met before.

‘Picture Of Mary’ is an atmospheric piece written with Bargeld, dominated by Lane’s ghostly singing and a backdrop of dramatic piano, mournful violin and jangly Latin guitars (from Blixa) which threaten to swell up in the mix but never quite do. The only thing that lets this track down is Lane’s vaguely tuneless musings which bring to mind some of Nico’s material, but that is more than made up for by the intricate backdrop. Latin guitars and strings also colour the maudlin ‘Stories Of Your Dreams’, which possesses a strong narrative and theatrical mood. The song was co-written with Neubuaten’s Alexander Hacke, who also plays guitars on the song, while Crime And The City Solution founding member Bronwyn Adams plays violin.

The CD release of Dirty Pearl also includes ‘A Prison In The Desert’ by Nick Cave, Mick Harvey and Bargeld, taken from their soundtrack to Ghosts… Of The Civil Dead. The piece sees Lane mostly wordlessly singing over a backdrop of droning strings, industrial sounds and high-pitched noises, her voice providing a gentle counterpoint to what is otherwise a reasonably harrowing piece of music, a bit like a Graeme Revell soundtrack.

Eschewing all the released tracks from The Birthday Party canon that Lane contributed to, Dirty Pearl instead offers ‘The Fullness Of His Coming’, an unreleased track which features Lane on lead vocals, serving as strong reminder of why The Birthday Party were a musical force to be reckoned with at the start of the Eighties. The song is dominated by grinding guitar riffs from Rowland S. Howard that sounds like they might have been fed through an organ, Tracy Pew‘s ludicrously prominent bass and insistent and quickening drums from Mick Harvey. Lane murmurs and squirms provocatively through the track, particularly as the pace begins to quicken, the assembled Party members providing a nasty mantra of the track’s title while Lane writhes rapturously in the foreground.

Track listing:

lp/cd:
A1. / 1. Jesus Almost Got Me
A2. / 2. The Groovy Guru
A3. / 3. Sexual Healing
A4. / 4. Blume (Einstürzende Neubauten feat. Anita Lane)
B1. / 5. Subterranean World (How Long…?) (Die Haut feat. Anita Lane)
B2 / 6. Picture Of Mary
B3. / 7. The World’s A Girl
B4. / 8. Stories Of Your Dreams
9. A Prison In The Desert (Nick Cave / Mick Harvey / Blixa Bargeld feat. Anita Lane) – CD bonus track
10. If I Should Die – CD bonus track
11. I’m A Believer – CD bonus track
12. Lost In Music – CD bonus track
13. Sugar In A Hurricane – CD bonus track
B5. / 14. The Fullness Of His Coming (The Birthday Party feat. Anita Lane)

First published 2012; edited 2014

(c) 2014 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – He Wants You / Babe, I’m On Fire (Mute Records single, 2003)

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Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds 'He Wants You / Babe, I'm On Fire' 10" artwork

mute records | 10″/cd mute290 | 02/06/2003

The contrast between the two tracks from Nocturama that were released together as the album’s second single couldn’t be more divergent. ‘He Wants You’ is the sort of high balladry that Nick Cave had made his own by the time of the fourteenth Bad Seeds album, a sort of more embellished and plaintive version of the introspection that had first become evident around the time of The Boatman’s Call. Only, somehow, with its filigree piano lines and quiet, romantic murmurings, it seems a more exaggerated version of that period. It really is a beautiful song, one that crams so many illustrative gestures into its verses before an elegant simplicity takes over. The song appears to describe a man who will do absolutely anything he can do to get the woman of his dreams; but this isn’t the kind of obsessed character a far wilder Cave described on something like ‘From Her To Eternity’ – this is a far gentler, resolute and upstanding man. ‘He is straight and he is true,‘ he sings and we’re left thinking the persuer is a pretty nice bloke.

The wilder side of Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds comes to the fore on the edit of ‘Babe, I’m On Fire’, cut down from its fourteen minute album version to a tidy four minutes, wherein frantic organ lines and stream-of-consciousness lyrics cover everything from terrorism, right-wing politics, agriculture and even manages a nice backslapping name check of the members of the band. ‘Babe, I’m On Fire’ is urgent, messy and a bit of a musical trainwreck that feels improvised and sprawling and doesn’t appear to want to take itself too seriously, a band letting their collective hair down at the behest of their leader.

The single was backed with two extra tracks from the Nocturama sessions. ‘Little Ghost Song’ hinges on the same chorus from the album’s ‘Right Out Of Your Hand’ but sees Cave and Conway Savage harmonising unevenly together. Previous vocal pairings of the two have always been pretty tight, but this one doesn’t gel so neatly, leaving the listener wondering whose voice they’re meant to follow. ‘Everything Must Converge’ is far better. A spare, loose reflection that fate ultimately binds us all together, ‘Everything Must Converge’ has a lovely gospel quality to it, lots of reference points from nature and a really beautiful sound. It’s bold and romantic without ever becoming over-sugared, featuring some restrained organ riffing and a fantastic wandering harmonica melody that seems to usher in a totally unexpected reggae-infused segment. Understated and remarkable.

Track listing:

10″/cd:
A1. / 1. He Wants You (Edit)
A2. / 4. Everything Must Converge
B1. / 2. Babe, I’m On Fire (Edit)
B2. / 3. Little Ghost Song

Written 2013 / published 2014

(c) 2014 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

The Birthday Party – Mutiny / The Bad Seed EP (4AD EP, 1983)

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4ad | cd cad301cd | 1983

I’ve always been of the opinion that if an artist or band is going to make a final statement, then it should be well-executed and tightly-delivered. This holds true for The Birthday Party’s final two EPs, which are collected together onto this single CD by 4AD. The Bad Seed (originally released as a 12″ on the band’s UK home of many years, 4AD) and Mutiny (originally released on Mute) were both recorded at the famous Hansa Studios in Berlin and produced by the band themselves, with uncredited assistance from Einstürzende Neubauten’s Blixa Bargeld.

By now the erstwhile drummer Phil Calvert was long disposed with in favour of Mick Harvey; Rowland S. Howard became the sole guitarist and the creative dynamic had shifted toward the writing partnership of Nick Cave and Harvey (with the exception of the opener, ‘Sonny’s Burning’, the last track written by all four members of the group). The sound is raw and urgent, but well-honed and less prone to excess, while still retaining enough of the rough edge that set The Birthday Party apart from their contemporaries.

‘Wild World’ stands out as a highlight, blessed by its sludgy blues ethic and restrained vocal performance from Cave, whose vocal has become more direct and confident throughout this awesome collection. Tracy Pew’s bass is close-mic’d to allow the resonant twang of the strings to be heard. Elsewhere, Howard’s guitar is fed through numerous effects boxes, in particular deploying his famous ‘infinite reverb’ on several tracks, which allowed cycles of feedback to spiral, ebb and flow. While recorded no doubt at the height if the band’s drug abuse, the collection is markedly more controlled than Junkyard, as if recorded in a brief moment of lucidity. Nothing is more true of this approach than the final track, ‘Mutiny In Heaven’ (featuring Bargeld on guitar), which sees the band playing with studio effects with Cave’s vocal lines overlapping and multi-tracked, while the guitars are processed into ringing bells of sound. ‘If this is heaven I’m bailing out,‘ sings Cave. The Party was nearly over, and Cave thus signalled that the last guest should leave. ‘Mutiny In Heaven’ deals with the concept of euphoric God-like feelings following a hit of smack, but I’m not clear on whether it glorifies or condemns it. More extreme than the Velvet Underground’s opium hymn, ‘Heroin’, ‘Mutiny In Heaven’ has an edge that is as marvellous as it is malevolent.

Two previously-unreleased demos from the Mutiny sessions are included on the CD – ‘The Six Strings That Drew Blood’ (a totally different track from that which later appeared on Cave’s The Firstborn Is Dead) and ‘Avalanche Of Sound’, both of which are stripped and raw and perfect even as unfinished works.

Although a year away, Bargeld’s appearance on the final track heralded the approach of The Bad Seeds, the band Cave formed around Bargeld and Harvey. As final statements go, this stacks up very higly indeed, leaving you unsure as to whether it’s enough as it is or whether you’re in need of more.

Track listing:

cd:
1. Sonny’s Burning
2. Wildworld
3. Fears Of Gun
4. Deep In The Woods
5. Jennifer’s Veil
6. Six Strings That Drew Blood
7. Say A Spell
8. Swampland
9. Pleasure Avalanche
10. Mutiny In Heaven

First published 2004; edited 2012; re-edited 2014

(c) 2014 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence