N°88 NICK CAVE AND THE BAD SEEDS - THE CURSE OF MILLHAVEN

I hardly need to introduce Nick Cave so I’ll keep it short. He’s and Australian musician, author and (occasionally) actor. He was the frotnman for three different Australian bands. In the early eighties he fronted The Birthday Party, a violent gothic but also punky band. After the split he founded Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds together with his friend Mick Harvey, also a memeber of The Birthday Party.

The Bad Seeds evolved to a more alternative rock format and left the earlier gothic edge Cave had. You’ll still find the darkness in the music from time to time, especially when listening to the lyrics on the album Murder Ballads. This is the album which gave us the singles Henry Lee and the duet with Kylie Minogue ‘Where The Wild Roses Grow’. All songs are about death and murder and serial killers. Although the posted song has a happt up-tempo sound it still is a scary and dark story. The latest Bad Seeds album was released in 2008 and named ‘Dig, Lazarus, Dig!’. After that Cave tried to launch a solo career but also came up with a slim fit sizes Bad Seeds band called Grinderman. With that group he released two albums simply called ‘Grinderman’ and ‘Grinderman 2’.

Murder Ballads is the ninth studio album by Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds and was released in 1996 and as said it’s all about crime and murder. If you make the total body count on the album you’ll come up to 65 dead people. Knowing the album contains 10 songs makes it an average of 6,5 killings per song. Quite a nice rate. The Curse of Millhaven must be the worst of ‘em all counting at least 23 bodies. The album contains quite a few duets. We all know the one with Kylie Minogue but also PJ Harvey, who was once Nick Cave’s girlfriend, Shane McGowen and Anita Lane accompagnied Nick Cave on the singing part.

To me it’s one of the best albums on the globe. I love the sounds, the duets, the subjects (evil laughter from myself accompagnies this remarks). It is also the album in which I first discovered Nick Cave’s sounds and I fell for it although I must say that most of the times I like his Grinderman records even more. I’ve also chosen The Curse … since it’s a very up tempo song and it sounds like a big party, which it isn’t, and it has the most body counts. 

A little slip of the curtain for the next link: It’ll be either PJ Harvey, Grinderman or Kylie Minogue. I still have a few days tot hink it over. Now let’s kill some people in a little town called Millhaven.