When I buy a new album I don’t put
it into the main collection until after I’ve given it at least three solid
back-to-back listens. Because I buy a lot of albums, and spend a lot of my
listening time randomly reviewing albums from the entire collection, I’m
usually a little behind.
I just finished giving this next
album three good listens and putting it away. Then a week later I randomly
rolled it for review, so it was pretty fresh in my mind.
Disc 810 is….Let Love In
Artist: Nick Cave
and the Bad Seeds
Year of Release: 1994
What’s up with the Cover? Nick does his best Iggy Pop
impersonation. Like Iggy, Nick Cave is ‘ugly sexy’ – a guy so sexy that he
seems more attractive than he is. Of course, this cover pushes that theory to
its limits.
How I Came To Know It: I’ve been taking lately to
Youtubing artists I’m interested in and going through their discography to see
what albums are worth getting. I recently checked out the half dozen or so Nick
Cave albums I didn’t yet have and found two worth getting: “Let Love In” and
“The Good Son.”
How It Stacks Up: I now have 10 Nick Cave albums – mostly his
later work. I like them all in some degree or other but competition is fierce.
I only recently purchased “Let Love In” but it was still able to knock “Tender
Prey” out of sixth spot in my heart.
Ratings: 4 stars
For Nick Cave love is not a pleasant romantic notion
so much as it is an endurance test; a trial for the faithful and not the faint
of heart. When Cave says ‘let love in’ as this album’s title exhorts, it is the
romantic equivalent of inviting the vampire into your house. It is delicious
and darkly exciting, but you chase that thrill at your own peril. “Let Love In”
is Cave’s tragic, depressing often uncomfortable descent into the subject of
love. If you only like stories with happy endings, this isn’t the album for
you.
The record is full of somber piano trilling
through minor chords that connect the space between romantic love and
animalistic urges. Cave’s vocal delivery has few equals for causing his lyrics
to drip with meaning.
The prettiest song on the record is “Nobody’s Baby Now” which is the tragic
prequel to later romantic songs like “Into
My Arms” where things actually work out for our hero. Not so with “Nobody’s Baby Now,” which is the tale of
love gained and then lost, and the wailing and grieving we go through trying to
understand why things didn’t work out. Given that Cave sings that she’s nobody’s
baby now, the woman he pines for could well be dead, but it doesn’t matter –
this is a song of lost love regardless; a reminder of the desolation that results
when you let love in, but it refuses to stay.
The album is bookended by “Do You Love Me?” Parts One and Two. The first is the tale of a
woman who is bad news but that our narrator tragically marries anyway. The
second is a troubled tale of someone down on their luck being sexually
exploited in a dark theatre. Cave perfectly mirrors two unhealthy obsessions
with the same melody. First played first frantic and desperate, and later becoming
stretched thin and unwholesome.
The record is a treatise the many ways love can get
twisted and wrong, and Nick isn’t afraid to descend into troubling places to
mine material for his various character studies. Around each corner you are as
likely to find a sexual predator as you are a hopeless romantic.
The location might be highly specific, like the
title tavern in “Thirsty Dog” where our
anti-hero sits in a tavern apologizing for all the specific shortcomings his
lover sees in him. (I imagine he does so drunkenly to the bathroom stall wall).
Later Cave goes internal, exploring the psychological workings of love’s dark
underbelly. The title track opens with this haunting stanza:
“Despair and Deception, Love’s
ugly little twins
Come a knocking on my door, I let
them in
Darling, you’re the punishment
for all my former sins.
I let love in.”
Well, that’s deliciously sad, isn’t it? But for the
most part, you can’t capture the magic of these songs by reprinting the lyrics.
They become dead on the page, needing the visceral energy of the record to make
them breathe. You need the Bad Seeds delivering their dreamy phantasms of
Gothic rock and the devilish voice of Cave’s ringmaster preaching them to make
them fully work.
It is all very frightening, but I invite you to “Let
Love In” to your music collection nevertheless.
Best
tracks: Do You Love Me?, Nobody’s Baby Now, Red Right
Hand, I Let Love In, Thirsty Dog, Do You Love Me? Part Two
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