Your Funeral... My Trial (Collectors edition Original recording remastered)

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Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

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Without a doubt this is one of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds's most original albums. True, it's far from Cave's most accessible, but it's certainly one of a kind. Lugubrious, drunken phantasmagoria at its finest. Fraught with danger & eerie intensity.

Cave's delivery is debauched to say the least. As if he's about to nod off on the edge of an abyss. At other times, howling at the bottom of an empty well. Throughout, the Bad Seeds create an atmosphere of slow burning tension that on more than one occasion lives up to threat and erupts with a vengeance. Overall it's a narcotic pull into the maelstrom.

As for this long overdue reissue series of Cave's 1st 4 albums, it's nice to finally hear Your Funeral in its originally intended sequence. (might add the initial vinyl was released as a double EP).

At the time, anything resembling a traditional ballad was a rare commodity on a Bad Seeds record. Kicking off an album with such a haunting, dreamlike song may have thrown some fans for a loop. "Sad Waters" is quite simply one of the finest ballads Cave has ever penned. As dreamlike as it is, there's never been anything quite like what follows.

All reverie suddenly turns to nightmare. "The Carney" is ramshackle dose of gothic rain & bad directions. Think Kurt Weill meets Todd Browning's "Freaks". As a writer, Cave is on top of his game with this tale of a broken down circus and the burial of a horse known as "Sorrow". It's the album's signature track and a Cave classic. They've never recorded anything like it.

For somber, after hours delirium, it's hard to top the title track & "Stranger Than Kindness". Two songs that would be at home in any David Lynch soundtrack. The album then hits the home stretch with 4 searing, unhinged numbers culminating in a hair-raising cover of Tim Rose's "Longtime Man".

As with all the others in this reissue series, there is a DVD of extras. The interviews with the key players shed some light on this slice of mayhem. However, there are a few interviews with self-important fans waxing poetic & gushing inanely, etc I could do without. But I venture you'll walk away with a helluva lot of respect for Bad Seed Mick Harvey. Despite being so low key, it's clear he's pretty much the man behind holding this album (not to mention the band) together.

As mentioned earlier, the initial CD reissue re-sequenced the album out of order. But it did include an essential B-side: "Scum". Cave's blistering attack on journalist Matt Snow is as vitriolic as it gets. And Snow's reaction to the song in the DVD interview is priceless.

In the end, any complaints are trivial compared to the music & the vastly improved sound quality. Over all it's a generous gift to long time fans. Since I just about wore out my original copy, you guessed it---I don't mind shelling out for it again. Now there's the rest of the series to contend with...

Of all the albums issued by Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds over the years, Your Funeral My Trial stands as the most inscrutable and least accessible of all. I have always been a little ambivalent about it and until I bought this reissue, I probably hadn't listened to it in at least five years.

Like the other Bad Seeds albums that have been reissued to date as part of Cave's ongoing remastering project, the beauty of the album is the way the remaster has brought it to life. On this edition, my favorite way to listen is via surround sound. You hear absolutely everything and it leaves you wondering if the earlier edition you already own and this one are supposed to be the same recordings!

In my view, the best cut by far is The Carny. That is truly a chilling piece of work. I also really enjoy the eerie Stranger Than Kindness and Jack's Shadow, a song which to me presages Henry's Dream. In addition, I find the bonus track Scum to be most amusing.

Despite those highlights, Your Funeral My Trial is not and will never be a favorite. The quality of the remaster ensures that I will return to it on occasion, but there are other Cave CDs I like much better. As with others in this series, the CD is augmented by a DVD that contains the same music all over again. But you can listen to it in three different formats. There is also the previously mentioned bonus cut and a commentary segment that relates to this record. I have found the commentaries and remarks most unappealing and not really all that informative. Additionally, there are some downloads on the DVD but I have yet to check those out.

The discs are housed in an attractive six-panel gatefold and are accompanied by a booklet that contains album info, the lyrics, and a story by Amy Hanson about the album and where the band was musically and psychologically at the time of its issue. Despite the three-star rating, I recommend this and others in the remaster series as essential additions to the music collection of any serious fan of Nick Cave.