Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Nocturama

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Free Music Notes for Nocturama

Free Music Review: Nocturama Complaint
Hit: 5 Stars

All of the Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds releases, since the very beginning, shared the same format. They all had a big face shot of Nick Cave on the cover then, once you flip it over, a group shot of The Bad Seeds, usually without him, but not always.

When Bad Seeds releases became more CD formatted, sometimes this band photo would be on the flip of the inlay card and not the back of the CD plasticy bit.

But this one, and I have the UK import so maybe the US version on Tuesday will be different, has a big Nick Cave on the front and not a single Bad Seed photo at all!

I feel, I dunno, kinda cheated really.

It started with 1983 with From Her To Eternity, that album had full LP sized portrait photos of the Bad Seeds, and Blixa looked so freaky with his spiky hair and gaunt sucked in cheeks and those eyes. He has always had amazing, frightened animal eyes. And Anita Lane, Nick Cave's then girlfriend, was on there too since she had written a good deal of the albums lyrics.

And on First Born Is Dead 1985 (great album) there was Nick Cave in his death-row-hearing posture and on the back were three bored and dilapidated Bad Seeds. Blixa Bargeld sitting on a chair with his guitar in his lap, not even pretending to pretend to play it and Mick Harvey on the most distasteful and sorry looking drum set with "Bad Seeds" clumsily scrawled on the bass drum front. I loved that picture.

A year later came Kicking Against The Pricks with a classic Nick Cave on the cover, eyes looking to the side as usual, and multi color Bad Seeds new wave shots on the back. They are all wearing thin ties.

Fast forward to Tender Prey from 1988 (this is when I came in). A mean looking Nick Cave in a black suit with a red shirt, arms folded and holding a cigarette. Two rings on his last two digits. His penetrating gaze and the way he is leaning forward suggests he is closing a deal as the devil. Snatching up your soul. And the flip side, or in the inlay card of the CD version lies a set of melancholy looking Bad Seeds, and if you look closely at their pictures you shall see a cross-reference of all the hairdos I have ever attempted. A short lived and not very convincing Blixa spike job, a slick looking Thomas Wydler manicured coif, a playful non-committal Mick Harvey fly-away, an elegant Roland Wolf loosely brushed back job, and a greasy Kid Congo Powers doo-dad aged rockabilly thing.

Of course, there were others, the best being Henry's Dream, which somewhat played with the idea a bit. Instead of an actual Nick Cave on the front cover there was a billboard painting of a menacing Nick Cave, a bit film-noir lighting effect and the inlay card has two wonderful Bad Seeds-in-the-studio shots, but the amazing thing is that Nick Cave is actually present with them. Perhaps suggesting that it was more of a group effort, that album. I love those pictures though, Anton Corbijn did them in wonderful sepia and the room looked so cozy and strewn with wires and Nick Cave in his vest and rolled up sleeve, pointed shoes and everything.

There was, however, Murder Ballads from 1996. That had no pictures at all, but we all sorta knew that album was supposed to be different from the bunch. It was not supposed to fit in with the catalogue. It was separate. An idea unto itself. It was a project that was planned and hinted about in interviews for years and it was a complete thought, case closed.

But this album has a Nick on the cover, which you may have seen, and then a strangely intimate photo of him reclining on a couch wearing clothes I shall not imitate.

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