Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Abbatoir Blues
The Lyre of Orpheus
Mute, 2004 (CDStumm233)

All the releases on this month’s Playlist are unusual for us: they were all bought brand-new, factory wrapped, from the belly of HMV, and probably saw a few hundred yen go to the artists involved. Thus I hope to get an optimistic theme started in these reviews, because although these are all groups that have been around for a long time, they’re all producing excellent work and moving forward in interesting ways. We buy a lot of our music second-hand, and continue to listen to the same records we enjoyed twenty years ago; but music is a living force, and our old favourites should not be made to do the same thing for ever. It’s no good, for instance, to claim a liking for Nick Cave, and go on to say that his best days were in the 1980s. I’m being unfair, of course, because people are much more likely to say that about the Cure than they are about Nick Cave; but, at least alphabetically, Cave is a good place to start. I listened to the Birthday Party again earlier this week (‘Prayers on Fire’ [Missing Link/4AD, 1981]; ‘Junk Yard’ [Missing Link/4AD, 1982]), which is not an easy thing to do: the listening experience became much more pleasant after everyone discovered the virtues of melody. I put ‘Abattoir Blues’ on straight after, which is also unfair, but quite interesting: Cave’s older band holds up surprisingly well. There’s more continuity with the Birthday Party in the new Nick Cave than I expected to find. ‘Abattoir Blues’ is the most powerful Nick Cave record in years: confident, aggressive, and urgent, it recalls the best moments of his first solo albums after the Birthday Party. It has a story to tell, which is not unusual for him; but the novelty here is that it has a reason to tell its tale: a connection to the world as it is. This is probably the first more or less overtly political Nick Cave record. ‘The Lyre of Orpheus’ shows Cave making great strides along the road to Leonard Cohen, which is a pleasant and appropriate path for him to take. The challenge in this record is not in its novelty: we’ve heard him do this before, although rarely to this level of skill in the melodies, the arrangements, and the production. One comes across the Leonard Cohen comparison too much, but it works here: ‘The Lyre of Orpheus’ seems like the inner life of the singer, his Cohen territory. If ‘Abattoir Blues’ is a step out into the world, ‘The Lyre of Orpheus’ is the scene back indoors. We’ve come to associate Nick Cave’s kind of universal commentary with a certain style of turning the self into a character in a private drama: Cave’s lyrical persona starring in its own film; private in its origins, but very much played out in public, with wider significance in mind. Cave’s challenge now will be to balance the competing impulses of ‘Abattoir Blues’ and ‘The Lyre of Orpheus’, because he needs them both, and will develop best with the outer and inner worlds in some form of negotiated balance. These new albums show he’s fully capable of pulling this off. Cave said of his band late last year, in a Guardian interview, ‘We are men, we wear suits, and we go to work’. He knows his business, and has the work well in hand.

The Cure
The Cure
I Am/Geffen, 2004 (UICF-1027)

In a 2001 interview in the Guardian, Mark E. Smith of The Fall said ‘I sometimes give the group the wrong address for the studio. Because by the time they find it, they’re really annoyed. They play better that way.’ The new Cure album was recorded in less extreme states of annoyance, but their new American producer did insist on therapeutic ‘workshops’ before recording every song. It sounds nightmarish: poor Robert Smith being called upon to explain what he had in mind when he drafted all the songs, for the first time in a twenty-plus year career. The band survived, after some epic bickering, and came out with a fine album at the other side. ‘The Cure’ should find appreciative listeners among people who don’t already like the band, but its main appeal will be for those of us who’ve been following the Cure for some time. That doesn’t mean the record can’t stand up on its own; but that it makes for a richer listening experience in the context of their previous work. For the first time in a while, we can be optimistic about the future of this group. Smith doesn’t seem to be announcing the end of the Cure this time out, which is a good sign. He was seriously threatening the end of the group last time: ‘Bloodflowers’ (Fiction, 2000) tied up a number of loose ends, marked the end of the Cure’s relationship with Fiction records, found Smith turning forty, and – by coincidence or not – came at the turn of the last century. So we can think of ‘The Cure’ as a new start: obviously the same group, with the same concerns and habits as before; but (oddly, given the hideous workshops) a more relaxed version of themselves. The producer, who hails from a new school of American pop metal, is a longtime Cure fan, and has helped the band to realise a coherent sound that grows out of previous versions of the Cure without being lazy or self-serving. Perhaps musicians really do play better when they’re annoyed.

Radiohead
Hail to the Thief
Parlophone, 2003 (LC 0299)

It took me many years to get around to Radiohead, because their first hit single made such a bad impression on me. No matter: I still don’t much like their first record or two; but they’ve progressed very far beyond that now. Their latest full album is not the blinding shaft of light some critics and fans were hoping for, but it is an excellent record just the same. The guitars are an interesting weathervane for this group: sometimes demonstrating Fripp-ish noises, sometimes Johnny Marr sounds, sometimes Joy Division – generally an effortless development on the better ideas in pop music from the past twenty or so years. It’s a quirk of my background, to be sure, but I also hear echoes of Peter Gabriel’s Genesis in Radiohead. They’re more often called a new Pink Floyd, but the better comparison is with ‘Secondhand Daylight’ period Magazine (Virgin, 1979). The comparison becomes more interesting if you can mentally transpose Howard Devoto’s and Thom Yorke’s voices: it makes perfect sense; much more than Roger Waters or David Gilmour. Radiohead has a particular genius, much in evidence on ‘Hail to the Thief’, and has become that rare case of a band that grows into its own critical adulation. They are a genuinely interesting group, which gives one hope for pop music’s capacity to develop and grow. There’s always a fair bit of animal husbandry involved in the best pop, and Radiohead is no exception. We can even recall the late 1980s REM boom with ‘Hail to the Thief’: there’s something REM about the whole package, in the mumbling vocals, the hand-scrawled package artwork, the cryptic references in the lyrics and everything else besides. But there are also plenty of things REM never pulled off: loping bass lines that can be jazz or funk inflected as much as they are standard pop, brilliant sequencing, and innovative instrumentation. The whole fuses multiple kinds of pop, from psychedelic to progressive to post-punk and plenty more, without bursting at the seams or collapsing into incoherence. I’d like to think that this is the kind of music I’d be making, if I had the time and training to do it properly. It’s encouraging to discover that someone else has been nurturing a more or less similar range of influences. There is indeed a way forward for pop music, and Radiohead are right out in front.

Radiohead
Com Lag
Parlophone, 2004 (TOCP-66280)

This is a selection of live tracks, alternates, and (presumably) out-takes drawing on the moods and materials in ‘Hail to the Thief’. Radiohead has a habit of filling the space between ‘real’ albums with this sort of compilation. In most groups, this would be a bad sign; that’s not so here. One of the distinctive features of Radiohead is that they are just as good, if not better, on live and compilation albums as they are on fully realised studio projects. Our copy of ‘Com Lag’ proclaims itself a Japan-only release, but since the BBC lists it in their Radiohead discography, I’m a bit dubious about that: what we have is probably a Japanese version of something already available elsewhere. We usually get a Radiohead mini-album of some kind to coincide with their Japan tour schedule, and if that’s what this is, it’s a particularly good one. There’s a nice little inset book full of critical analysis, and the oddly forlorn spectacle of the lyrics done up in English and Japanese. I wonder about the wisdom of including lyric sheets with Radiohead records: the old REM approach, of stringing together suggestive bits of songs, would be a better idea. That might lead to fewer misapprehensions, because the effect of the words with the music is quite different from the effect of the words alone. It’s a problem of tone, and gloom. Critics often get annoyed at the tone of Radiohead albums, accusing them of being excessively gloomy. The idea seems to be that anger is all right, and even required in some circumstances; but dark, moody, brooding textures are out of bounds. This relates to the phobia most critics have about pop musicians who happen to have attended art school, or who have post-secondary degrees in literature and other fey pursuits. Sniffs of disapproval turn into howls of outrage if the moody and brooding pop musicians have the misfortune to get rich off their work: because, after all, what right do the rich have to be gloomy? Nick Cave is an art school veteran, but he’s been let off the hook. Radiohead are public-school lads who went on to good universities and then got stinking rich with their first major single. This makes them fair game, and they draw a lot of fire. It’s too bad, really, because we should hope for intelligent pop music, and should never be afraid to cultivate a dramatic mood. Fortunately, Radiohead are getting on as they must without bothering about the howls in the dress circle. We’ll be waiting, optimistic, to see how they manage.

–CR, January 2005

Date posted: 2005-01-22