Kicking Against the Pricks

by

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

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Once I read an interview with Leonard Cohen, and he was talking - very wisely, as usual - on how Cave ate, digested and spitted out in his own way Cohen's song "Avalanche" (in Cave's "From her to eternity"). Well, yes, this is a cover album, but in its way it is profoundly a Cave's album. Cave is a great lyricist and musician, but he is also an interpreter of first class, because he manage to make other people's song in his own very peculiar sound. Some reviewers wrote that here Cave chose his favourite artists. I don't think it's completely true: I would rather say that he chose his peculiar themes, the same that we find in his own compositions - digging and burying, killing without a reason or for jealousy or beauty or love's sake, corpses that come up from the grave despite the rules of death, the power of natural elements and especially water as an image of time and changing (also epistemologically) as well as of the deepest and murkiest regions of the mind, breaking the law and death penalty, judging and killing and leaving... The quality of the songs is very good, but I think what really makes this album great is its inner thematic coherence, as different steps in a very contorted but eriching path Cave has been following since the very beginning of his career. Follow him, you might agree or disagree with him, but as every good artist he is always showing you the same things from new and more revealing points of view.

Nick Cave is a man who has inspired extremes of loyalty. Held to be a Messiah of Goth during his Birthday Party years in the early '80s, his career as singer-poet with Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds has followed a perverse and fascinating path. From a demented witch-doctor of Australian rock he has become a lovesick crooner of unexpected tenderness.

Kicking Against The Pricks, was an important blood-stained milestone in this progress. On this record, the singer acknowledged his influences with a collection of covers as exhilarating as they are eccentric. His rendering of the likes of Hey Joe, The Singer and All Tomorrow's Parties might not be to everybody's taste, but in its own way it's as affectionate a tribute as Elvis Costello's country album Almost Blue.