Disc 369 is...Murder Ballads
Artist: Nick Cave
Year of Release: 1996
What’s Up With The Cover?: A painting by Jean Frederic Schnyder, a 20th century Swiss artist I've never heard of. This isn't the style of painting I'd hang in my home, but it does a nice job of capturing the combination of weird and cold that is "Murder Ballads."
How I Came To Know It: Sheila introduced us to Nick Cave by purchasing the amazing "Boatman's Call" (reviewed way back at Disc 13). I liked it a lot, and while digging for more Nick Cave albums, I found a reference to an album that was filled with songs about murder. I had to find it, and when I did, I bought it without hesitation.
How It Stacks Up: We have seven Nick Cave albums, and of those seven I would say "Murder Ballads" is tied with "The Boatman's Call" for first.
Rating: 4 stars but only a tiny hair from 5
Writing a bloody and disturbing tale is not as simple as it seems. It requires pacing, careful timing in drawing out the more gruesome details and a willingness to let your imagination wander until you trouble even yourself.
"Murder Ballads" is a clinic, ten times over, on how to do it right. Anyone who knows Nick Cave knows he's never shy of exploring the darker parts of human nature, but on this record he takes that exploration to a whole new level. These songs draw you into a grisly fascination that is a mix of romance and prurience, held together with the blood of the victims in each song. As the narrator in the first track, "Song of Joy" sings:
"Was it an act of contrition or some awful premonition
As if she saw into the heart of her final blood-soaked night?
Those lunatic eyes, that hungry kitchen knife
Ah, I see, sir, that I have your attention!"
This last line could speak to every song that follows as well, as Cave explores every dark recess of murder and makes us watch. Woman falling victim to predators, psychopathic teens killing their neighbours and mass killings in drinking dives named "The Bucket of Blood" and "O'Malley's Bar."
Some of the songs are set in particular eras, with title character "Stagger Lee" killing and raping his way through 1932. Others, like "Song of Joy," "Where The Wild Roses Grow" or "The Kindness of Strangers" have a timelessness to them. The terrifying crimes depicted could have taken place last year, or last century, and seem equally at home.
Vocally and musically, Cave keeps the tone discordant. On "The Kindness of Strangers" he strangles out the refrain "O poor Mary Bellows" over and over again, signalling well in advance of her death that she is doomed.
Many tracks feature the piano being banged away at in overly-heavy handed fashion, often in minor keys. It is designed to set you on edge and it works. At the same time, the songs draw you in and make you an ashamed voyeur to their topics. They are catchy and easy to pick up, as a traditional ballad should be, singing songs that you could travel town to town with hundreds of years ago, entertaining the locals, if you dared to have them wonder what sort of person would recount such horrors.
Cave takes time and attention to get you deep into the head of killers, and makes you feel a little guilty by association just for tagging along. In "The Curse of Millhaven" we meet Loretta (who advises that she prefers Lottie) a fifteen year old psychopath, who describes herself thusly:
"...my eyes aint' green and my hair ain't yellow
It's more like the other way around
I got a pretty little mouth underneath all the foaming."
A special treat is hearing Kylie Minogue as I'd never heard her, singing the part of the victim, Elisa Day, in "Where The Wild Roses Grow," where she lends a beautiful vulnerability amidst all of Cave's characterizations of evil. I don't think I'll ever be able to hear "Can't Get You Out Of My Head" the same again after hearing her sing about her skull being caved in by her lover on a secluded river bank.
The album's last song is a hymn of sorts called "Death Is Not The End" featuring guest vocalists including PJ Harvey, Shane MacGowan, Kylie Minogue and a few other Bad Seeds infusing an almost ironic sense of hope to the record. However, to me the album's end point is the preceeding track, an over fourteen minute masterpiece called "O'Malley's Bar" which features a disturbed man going into his small town pub, where he knows everyone, and proceeding to slaughter everyone there, naming each one as he does.
By the end of the song, as Cave voices the killer's tortured choked mumbling in the back of a police car, the death toll is a dozen people, and we are spared no detail of each. Beginning the slaughter, the killer depicts his own motives as somehow outside of free will:
"My hand decided that the time was nigh
And for a moment it slipped from view
And when it returned it fairly burned
With confidence anew.
"Well the thunder from my steely fist
Made all the glasses jangle
when I shot him I was so handsome
It was the light, it was the angle."
This record is not for everyone. If you are offended by violence or harsh language, you will most certainly be offended (the passages I've quoted are among the milder ones). If you prefer your murders dressed up and sanitized as 'homicides' then this isn't for you either.
"Murder Ballads" is an album of murder and violent deeds, that forces you to look into the evil recesses of disturbed minds, usually depicted in the first person. If you like your narrative steak served raw and bloody, and don't blanche easily, then you might just enjoy this record as much as I did, which was quite a lot.
Best tracks: Song of Joy, Stagger Lee, Where The Wild Roses Grow, The Curse of Millhaven, The Kindness of Strangers, O'Malley's Bar
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