boffo's Full Review: The Firstborn is Dead by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
This was Nick Cave's second solo album released as a follow up to his debut From Her To Eternity in 1985. It polished away most of the wild noise that spilled over from Cave's earlier band The Birthday Party that still remained on eternity. This record is a much less eclectic and more uniform record that focuses on minmalistic bluesy song.
This is a musically more minimalistic album, this can perhaps be explained in that cave's backing band The Bad Seeds were down to only three members wich is their lowest memeber count ever.
The three members however where perhaps the three most famous bad seeds ever: multi-instrumentalists Barry Adamson and Mick Harvey and unconventional German guitarist Blixa Bargeld. Harvey and Bargeld remain with the bad seeds to this day while Adamson would leave the band after two more recordings and embark upon a solo career.
Lyrically this album focuses completely on Cave's storytelling side. The tales he tell as well as the blusey music on this album is deeply rooted in the american south, tough ironically Cave himself is of australian birth. The songs are all more or less bleak and there are nine tracks altogether on this album:
1 - Tupelo
This song is basically about Elvis' birth but christian imagery is used frequently in the lyric and an apocalyptical theme is used as well and the child is supposed to Carry the burden of Tupelo. The tale of this birth is accompanied by a rumbling bass and pounding drums and the lightning sound effects at the beginning and end of the song really gives it an apocalyptical feel. This is the album's most famous song since it was released as a single and was played live by the band for many years however it has never been one of my favorites.
2 - Little Girl Tree
A very bluesy number with Bargelds electric slide guitar. The songs lyric tells a tale of betrayal. later the song takes of with more pounding drums as Cave sings
Her velvet gown, down down down
one of my favorite songs on the album.
3 - Train Long suffering
A song that, as the title implies, uses a rushing train as a metaphor for suffering. The music tries to give the feel of a rushing train with a chugga-chugga rhytm pattern. Over this Cave exchange vocal lines with the Bad Seeds in a call and response pattern with the bad seeds echoing Cave's lines.
4 - Black Crow King
This song gives a typical example of Cave's black humor as the black crow king was a nick name the british press had given him. In this song Cave retorts by painting the black crow king as the most miserable character imaginable, a lonesome man standing in the middle of a corn field surrounded by black crows. This is typical of how Cave dealt with criticism early in his career. If the press said he was to gloomy he would portray himself as gloomy as possibly, if he was accused of being a misogynist he would gladly agree and even ask why no one had figured it out earlier. Later on Cave would become warmer and more straightforward but that would be many years down the line from this album. The music is a slow and thrasy swamp-blues number.
5 - Knockin' On Joe
This is one of the albums more haunting songs and descbribes a death row prisoners thoughts on his lost lover and on his forthcomming execution. The music is a beatiful and slow with a great piano part and some great harmonica playing by Cave himself.
6 - wanted man
This is a Bob Dylan song that the bad seeds changes totally. Changing chord structure and lyrics. Cave added two more verses to the original lyric and since the lyrics simply lists places in wich the character of the song is wanted ending with:
But there's on place I'm not wanted,
it's a place that I call home
one can not really tell that two writers have added to the lyric. The song isn't that great, a simple blues pattern that's repeated over and over.
7 - Blind Lemon Jefferson
This song strikes me as kind of silly since Cave at the time of writing it knew nothing about the early blues singer Blind Lemon Jeffeson, but simply liked the name. The song is slow and atmospheric and feels way to long weighing in at over six minutes.
8 - The Six Strings That Drew Blood
This is a song that Cave originally wrote for the birthday party. The song is changed a lot from it's earlier incantation however. The original was a speedy punk rock song and this version is slowed down a lot and uses vibes and whistling to archive a spooky feel this is coupled with Bargelds sometimes seemingly random and weird guitar playing.
9 - Tupelo (Single Version
This is a bonus track on the CD-Release. The single version is quite similar to the opening album version of the song. It has a slightly different mix and is two minutes shorter to fit the Video that was shot to it.
This album is one of cave's more obscure efforts and I wouldn't recommend it to first time listeners who should preferably pick up one of his later albums such as Henry's Dream, Let Love In, Boatman's Call or perhaps the best of collection wich includes Tupelo. This blues-based style is only present on this record and most other albums are far more eclectic. If you're looking particulary for experimental blues rock you might want to check this album out and if you're fan you'll probably wan't all of his recordings anyway, so go ahead.
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