NICK
CAVE AND THE BAD SEEDS
The
Good Son
Mute 1990
The
Good Son is definitely the Bad
Seeds most easy listen up to this point in their career.
How easy is it? It’s so easy that I bought a cassette for
my mother to play in her car after it came out. That's no joke.
And that’s not really so strange as most of it certainly sounds
like something that could be found in one corner or another of your
parents’ record collection – maybe somewhere between
a 50s Kurt
Weill musical and a Barry
Manilow album. OK, to be more fair yet less clever
- early Scott
Walker, early Tom
Waits, and other piano and orchestra-driven balladry
that mixes it up a bit. And as easy listening stars had great taste
in songwriters, doing only the best of Jacques
Brel or Jimmy
Webb, here Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds perform their
most solid collection of songs up to this point in their career.
The Bad Seeds were certainly
never strangers to the ballad - only this time the proportion of
ballads to heavy and experimental material leans much further towards
the softer, safer end of the spectrum.
“Foi
Na Cruz”, sets a very syrupy international soft
pop vibe for the rest of the record to follow. But it’s more
diverse than you may remember. There are a diversity of songs –
sparse piano ballads, modernist atonal bits, a couple of exotic
rhythm driven tunes, and even a gospel rocker. Each time the record
starts to soften up a bit too much, the
hammer comes down hard to give you a little relief.
Overall, nary a dud be present in the bunch. By the time “Lucy”
references “The
Piano Has Been Drinking” as if it were orchestrated
for the Great White Way, your will find your belly quite satisfied
with this collection of pure song sustenance .
Oh yeah, I
almost forgot, there are electric guitars on this album, but they’re
even less pronounced than on Tender Prey. Though “The
Hammer Song” contains a great exercise in amplified dissonance,
the guitars primarily function of the electric guitars on The
Good Son is subtle ambience. Hence, Kid Congo Powers jumped
ship not long after.
Hear
Kid tell you more about recording The Good Son in Brazil, mixing
it in Berlin, and parting ways with the Bad Seeds in Los Angeles.
Go
back to Kid Congo Powers' Discography, Pt. 2
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