The blues had long been a potent undercurrent in
the Birthday Party
's music, so it wasn't all that surprising that
Nick Cave
embraced the sound and feeling of rural blues on his second album with
the Bad Seeds
,
The Firstborn Is Dead
. What was startling was how well
Cave
and his bandmates --
Barry Adamson
Mick Harvey
, and
Blixa Bargeld
-- were able to absorb and honor the influences of artists like
Skip James
and
Charley Patton
while creating a sound that was unmistakably their own. The moody obsessions of rural blues -- trains, floods, imprisonment, sin, fear, and death -- seemed made to order for
, and he was able to tap into the doomy iconography of this music with potent emotional force; on
"Tupelo,"
he makes a sweeping and disturbing epic of the rain-swept night when
Elvis Presley
was born, and
"Knocking on Joe"
is a tale of life on the work gang that communicates the pain of the spirit as clearly as the ache of the body. Also, the blues helped transform
's music as well as his lyrics; the brutal sonic pummel of
here gave way to a more subtle and dynamic approach that still made effective use of dissonance and bare-wired electric guitar noise while proving the balance of loud and soft only made each side deeper and more resonant. (The stark, barely there guitar and drums of
"Blind Lemon Jefferson"
are as startling and malignantly fascinating as anything in
's catalog.)
proved
's musical palate was significantly broader than his debut album suggested and pointed to a path (channeling the sounds and emotions of American roots music) he would return to on many of his albums that followed. ~ Mark Deming