It's about time Nick Cave made another good album!!!

xxpost

I've always more or less assumed the religious stuff was a bit of a pose, but he seems almost . . . sincere here. Maybe it's just another, more sincere-sounding, pose. And it is fairly subtle (to the extent Nick Cave can be subtle). This isn't his Slow Train Coming or anything remotely like it.

Anyway, loving this album. Oddly, though, 'And No More Shall We Part' is my favourite album of his, and one of my favourite albums ever - I seem to be the only person who rates it so highly though.

Nocturama was shit, to me. All other Cave records, including No More Shall We Part, I adore.

one of the best live shows I've ever been to, FWIW, was during the No More Shall We Part tour

He's been on a roll with the crap album titles though, hasn't he?

Ha ha! I initially read it as "It's about time Nick Drake made another good album!"

the thing about cave - whom i love, even when he's outlandishly bad - is that it always seems like he's hedging his bets because of how he plays up the cartoon-character dynamic between old screwball cave and pious balladeer cave. and a lot of the time he doesn't really get past that, leaving little other than viscerality at the fore. Nocturama kinda broke the mold though with its solemn crapness, and it felt like his least affected record. And while it wasn't entirely poorer for it, maybe things were better when he was hedging his bets. or maybe i'm full of shit. either way, I'm remarkably unexcited about the new album, which i never thought would happen. le sigh :'(

So it seems the ol' man has a new album out. Single is streaming on his website. I moderately like it.

oh man, i wish i wasn't at work right now so's i could listen. i am wicked psyched. after "abattoir/lyre" and grinderman i am very anxious to hear what comes next.

the single is growing on me. I'm hoping the album will be another winner.

i think abbatoir/lyre might be my fav ever by now.

same here, m@tt - it escaped the psycho-religious melodrama of nocturama and no more shall we part, which i thought were a bit heavy-handed and, well, boring in places. he's a lot better at fire and brimstone than he is at tortured spiritual yearning. even the more lighthearted tracks, like breathless, seemed to have more heft and sincerity. plus, the gospel choir totally kicked ass. i hope he tours the U.S. this year.

yeah it is more lighthearted in a way, like i think my favorite part on the record is where he cracks up the background church choir singers on "hiding", i like how they just left it in...

Ha, this is where I admit I never got around to listening to Abbatoir/Lyre, even though I've had it since it came out. (Similarly Grinderman. There's just too much stuff out there to listen to! Also frankly I think I needed a break from Nick in general.)

i was kind of sick of him until lyre came out

Abattoir/lyre was Nick Cave's best album, as well as the best album of 2004.

So no-one picked up his new album? I honestly don't know if I can be bothered.

First couple of tracks are good but I got bored pretty quickly. Maybe I'll give it another go.

Proof, if any further proof were needed, that great music is not created in standard office hours.

?

In a recent interview, after the journalist suggested he'd become pretty predictable, NC claimed no other artist had ever made as many radically different albums.

"What about Bob Dylan?" journo then asks
"Not even Bon Dylan"

Nick Cave, open 9-5 Monday to Friday. Early closing Wednesday.

The Bad Seeds tend to take a long lunch on Fridays and have a few glasses of wine and end up sitting about on Facebook all afternoon instead of working. Nick Cave gets really fucked off.

Yes, if I want to hear radical dizzying leaps and innovations from album to album, I always reach for Nick Cave and Bob Dylan

Seriously, that's what he does. He goes into his back bedroom office in Brighton and does strict 9-5 hours Monday-Friday and that's when he does all of his songwriting.

i haven't heard the new record yet, or at least in it's entirety. i'll get it around to it as it's meant to good.

but i will say that i'm finding 'nocturama' to be rather underappreciated these days. i sort of made a special effort to listen to it in very detailed fashion, mostly out of intrigue that it's the clear red-headed stepchild in the nick cave/bs canon. but it's pretty good really. not his worst, obviously far from his best. just pretty damn good.

Infallible rule of thumb with Nick Cave albums: only ever buy if going for £2-3 in MVE.

xp What would be the worst then?

Anything after about 1988 would qualify, really.

Boatman's Call was pretty good, I thought

i used to have a bit of trouble with the first 3 records - never really got into 'kicking against the pricks', but you can put that down to the fact i find abrasive covers of more conventional originals to be a bit offputting. a pretty potent statement nonetheless. and the first two records are fairly great misanthropic works of art.

if you actually look at all of his stuff, it's pretty consistent in it's quality. and admittedly challenging to pinpoint something too much worse than 'nocturama'. but i'll have to say 'kicking against the pricks' is the worst album in my opinion, while there are a couple of records there ('boatman's call' actually does springsto mind) that i'd much less rather listen to these days than 'nocturama'. hmmm maybe it's because i've played them to death, i don't know.

'No More Shall We Part' is pretty dull.

Boatman's Call would have been good if he'd hired Robbie Williams to do the vocals.

i really love 'god is in the house' and 'hallelujah' (from 'no more shall we part'), but a couple of the tunes do drag

For me 'No More' and 'Nocturama' are increasingly dull variations on the 'Boatman's Call' template. I never got that much into 'Kicking against the Pricks' but the covers of "The Singer" and "Long Black Veil" make it pretty classic in any case.

I think Nick Cave's best days are a long, long way behind him though. For me he peaked with 'Your Funeral My Trial'. 'Tender Prey' was pretty great too, and 'The Good Son' has its moments. From then on, it's a long slow decline. Or maybe I'm just not too fond of all that balladeering stuff.

Thing is, as both Grinderman and that last track on Nocturama proved, he's no good at doing the uptempo rocking stuff either.

I dunno, I like the new album.

I also liked Grinderman and Abbatoir Blues/Lyre of Orpheus.

He would be better regarded if he released about a quarter of the records that he does release.

man's gotta eat!

He's got an office to run!

He's done some OK stuff through the nineties and noughties. But in the eighties he was pretty amazing. He's gone from amazing to OK, which I guess is better than some manage.

Dingbod, perhaps he would have been better regarded had he only released one single, a duet with Leona Lewis released solely in Burkina Faso?

Your Funeral... was indeed a peak, but then he had another -- and to me, more blindsiding -- peak with Abattoir/Lyre. Can anyone say where his new one falls in the light of those two?

He's no good at doing the rocking stuff, Dingbod? Umm...Birthday Party?

I actually really like most of the new one, esp. the title track, "Night of the Lotus Eaters" and "We Call Upon the Author."

gave the new one a couple spins last weekend, pretty good.

He's no good at doing the rocking stuff, Dingbod? Umm...Birthday Party?

Note that I used the present tense.

He's an unfortunate example of why musicians should be on drugs :-(

I think the title track, "Albert Goes West," "We Call Upon the Author," and "More News From Nowhere" are all pretty great. 4 out of 11's not bad, when none of the other 7 are even close to a waste of time. I like the NYC feel to lots of the songs.

Cave's a real writer at least (due to writing well--not to being a published author), and I like how his lyrics have become more writerly on the last several records.

Conversely, the hugely under-appreciated "No More Shall We Part" has stunning instrumentation and great production, two things that sounds really thin and weak on "The Boatman's Call," at least to my ears.

the last album was great, nocturama was NOT great, it is certainly his worst album...no more shall we part was just dull. yes they did follow the boatmen's call template, but that was a brilliant album and should have been the only album he did like that. I could not get past the first two songs on the new one, nor did I like the grinderman album very much..disappointed. I'd still see him live if he came back to the states though

I'd be down with Nick Cave writing more movies.

He is/did - he's doing another one with Hillcoat and Winstone.

really? hillcoat's committed to The Road afaik.

While there certainly been a few low points (Boatman's, Nocturama) I would be hard-pressed to name another person who's recorded output has been as consistently great as Nick Cave's has been. Even a mrginal Cave record is better than most of what I hear.

Deriding Grinderman is just plain crazy. That is some frantic , beautiful shit and live was was unreal.

I have high hopes for this record coming on the cusp of the Grinderman and Lyre/Abattoir.

I think he did his best work in the '90s, Good Son -> Boatman's Call.
His output this decade, though, has been a bit draggy, but the newie is a marked improvement.
And I know no-one will disagree with me when I say that "No Pussy Blues" was the best single of last year.

he was v. good in nyc last week, though 'more news from nowhere' was an awfully anticlimactic encore

my 70-year-old dad really likes 'no pussy blues'

I thought Grinderman was a step in a good direction for Cave after those last few recs--even though the album was a bit inconsistent in quality, I thought. But I remember a while back seeing a live clip of one of the songs I didn't care for, I forget which now, but I recall thinking it was rather amazing. And you just can't f with No Pussy Blues.

Looking forward to hearing this new one some time.

seen the cave twice. first time overwhemingly classic. second time, rather dud

'fifteen feet of pure white snow' is an awesome live track

Even a marginal Cave record is better than most of what I hear.

OTM ^^

I'll pick up the new one sometime soon, looking forward to it. I think Nocturama's pretty good actually, and if there's an album I have to consider his worst, then I'd pick No More Shall We Part.

Cave is one of those artists where I have difficulty in deciding whether his output has actually declined or whether I've just had enough of it. I'm not sure how much time I would have for 'Tender Prey' if it came out today Alternatively, if I'd discovered him age 15 with 'No more shall...', maybe I'd find that one pretty amazing.

he's one of those artists who can simply be hard work
tried sitting through 'murder ballads' the other night, then decided about half way through that i actually like the concept and musical ambition of the album more than the experince of actually listening to it.

he does have quite a large number of amazing songs that i'll always return to though.

if I'd discovered him age 15 with 'No more shall...'

which is exactly what I did!

Hmmm, new one is getting a lot of praise. I might be tricked once more into buying it

it's solid

It's more than solid, it's downright excellent. Nick increases his sonic palette with psych touches. You know how the bell in "Red Right Hand" just MAKES that song? There are moments like that in every song on _Dig Lazarus Dig_.