Bad Seeds, Nick Cave - Good Son
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Free Music Notes for Good Son
Free Music Review: yeah, man!
Hit: 5 Stars
I like this album a lot. But then, I also love Kicking Against the Pricks. I think the songs "The Hammer Song" and "Lucy" get underrated. For that matter, so does "The Ship Song."Free Music Review: I'm disintegrated
Hit: 5 Stars
disturbing fatally disturbing fragment me again, again,buy it, do it, kill your priest,father, good son, bad seed, father, good son, bad seedFree Music Review: O Lord the songs come down...
Hit: 4 Stars
"The Good son" opens with a song ("Foi na cruz") that's so easily forgettable that you can't quite believe that it's Nick Cave here. But then the title track rolls in and the on-stage-dark-rock-preacher Cave is back. Stormy, thundering, preaching, "The Good son" is what "The Mercy seat" was on the "Tender prey" album, and what "Tupelo" was on "The firstborn is dead": a classic, a mind bender, a face-busting, crowd-mangling hailstorm.
After that three neat, almost too neat sounding slow songs creep in: "Sorrow's child" (...sits by the river / Sorrow's child / hears not the water..."), "The ship song" (praised by many and sometimes called one of Cave's most outstanding ballads, which I definitly must deny here) and "The Hammer song", on which the mesmerising, dark voice of singer Cave is used almost to the point that it feels exploited - and you expect him on this track to explode somewhere in vein, to burst out and hammer a chorus of faul language and eye-gouging madness on us all, but in fact he never does, and in this case, it causes a possitive effect: Nick still isn't predictable or obvious. "The Hammer song" does anything but end with a crushing hammer slash.
I between these three songs there is the instant-classic sing-along piece "The weeping song", a melodramatic duet, almost a play, between Nick Cave and backing vocalist / guitar player Blixa Bargeld.
But then the extasy is over, and the album offers three more quite, introvert songs to get trough, and non of them really tend to stick.
This is often a problem with Nick Cave ballads, some of them really get to you ("Mercy" on "Tender prey", "Stranger than kindness" on "Your funeral... my trial", "Do you love me (Part 2)" on "Let love in" and about all tracks on the near perfect "No more shall we part") but a lot of them just don't stick, they do not twist and turn inside your head, they just ponder and wander on, you hear them and after they're finished, you nod and say "thank you" and then you go on with your life without having the feeling anything really happened.
This album really has too much of these "on going things" without really hurting you, which a good Nick Cave ballad does, and thank God for that, because that's really what we want from the man; to get hurt, to get hit in the right spot, straight in the heart, straight through our deceptively sane minds.
But that doesn't mean it's all blund and "just on going" - there's still the instant-classic sing-along piece, the dark mesmerising voice exploiting surprise, and the Cavian mind bender. And when these come from the dark echoing throat of The One Lord Nick Cave, you know you really get something.
Free Music Review: Order of chaos
Hit: 4 Stars
Coming hot on the heels of Nick Cave's raging, tortured masterpiece Tender Prey, The Good Son is a lot more tender and less musically chaotic by comparison, but is nearly as brilliant in its own way. The soft, rolling Foi Na Cruz sets the pace for the album well, perhaps coming as a surprise for some, but who could deny its serene beauty? The title track is much more of a "classic" Bad Seeds song by contrast, a lyrical re-telling of the Bible's prodigal son story, with fierce music and vocals to match the lyrics. None of these songs are weak, and the album's beautiful yet daring balladry approach perhaps reaches its climax with the closing song, the soaring Lucy (complete with an incredible reprise courtesy of Ronald Wolf.) However, the album's two best songs are undoubtedly The Weeping Song (memorable musical backing, coupled with a classic vocal trade-off), and what surely is one of Cave's greatest songs ever, The Ship Song, which is surely one of the most achingly beautiful and compelling love songs that I have ever heard. While not as menacing and overly forebearing as his earlier works, The Good Son is yet another high point in Nick Cave's catalog.Free Music Review: Another Fine Effort
Hit: 4 Stars
I haven't heard Nick Cave's earliest albums yet, so I can't comment on how The Good Son stacks up against those, but I can say that it compares well with his subsequent masterpieces of the 1990s.The CD starts with a quasi-religious, almost hymn-like song, in Portuguese no less. I liked it from the start as I do the title cut, the epic style of which rather defines Nick Cave for me.
In the Hammer Song, Mick Harvey's guitar work gives it the feel of a theme of a Western movie as the vocals outline the plot.
Next to the Hammer Song, my favorite is the Weeping Song, with its unusual cadence and call/response vocals.
The funniest cut is the Witness Song which takes a perhaps inadvertent crack at faith healing and the power of suggestion.
There is not one badly written song on the album, though obviously I have my favorites. The Good Son is another fine effort from Nick Cave and serves to bolster his reputation not only as a musician, but as a songwriter whose command of language sets him far apart from most of his contemporaries.