Moving away from full-band arrangements and character-based narratives, the album's music and lyrics move towards the more intimate sound of Cave's solo voice accompanied by piano or a few other instruments.

Celebrated as the band’s most starkly moving work, key tracks include the single “Into My Arms” and “People Ain’t No Good”, featured in the soundtrack to Shrek 2. Into My Arms" is of course a classic and a song I was aware of (and loved) before listening to the whole album. No band on their 10th album should have much more to say, but taking this turn for the reflective helped reignite The Bad Seeds and further secured their legacy. After a career spent tearing down the world with horror and disgust, Nick Cave finally sounds ready to start rebuilding from scratch.

It says a great deal about Cave as a person, and The Bad Seeds as a band, that they are willing to stare down these deeply personal situations within full view of the public gaze; to wrestle some kind of artistic redemption from the jaws of emotional defeat. His brief dalliance with Polly Harvey, whom he became infatuated with after their Henry Lee duet on Murder Ballads, is referenced on Green Eyes, Black Hair and the more direct West Country Girl.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. These ruptures in his life would not only influence the lyrical direction of this next album, but would completely remould The Bad Seed’s musical role, stripping them back to a level of restraint and sparseness which, at this point, was new and scary territory. A more cinematic focus would dictate the majority of their 90s output, moving through 92’s Henry’s Dream(which featured some of Cave’s most assured and sprawling lyrical compositions) and 94’s Let Love In, both of which bought The Bad Seeds a wealth of new focus from the critical mainstream. The album is entirely piano-based, alternately somber and romantic in mood, making it a marked departure from the bulk of the band's post-punk catalogue up to that point. Podemos hablar de disco en solitario ya que el papel de los Bad Seeds queda reducido a lo practicamente testimonial, no sólo por que es basicamente un disco de Cave sentado al piano si no porque es un disco de autor donde Cave se desnuda interiormente.Behind the scenes, several issues had aligned in Cave’s life; a traumatic break-up, a second stint in rehab for a still persistent heroin addiction, and, most famously, a passionate but swiftly extinguished love-affair. A album about the despair of breaking up, this album is one that suits a certain mood, at 48 years old I found myself in similar situation. or singer PJ Harvey, with whom he had a brief relationship around that time (as referenced in "West Country Girl", "Black Hair" and "Green Eyes"). To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

The songs are arranged around acoustic instruments and would reveal any pressing faults or imperfections like pops or background noise. Classic Album Sundays tells the stories behind the albums that have shaped our culture and in some cases, our lives. Stripped down and grown up--though still ghoulish and grave--Cave the storyteller has turned into something of a vampire Bruce Springsteen. Celebrated as the band's most starkly moving work, key tracks include the single 'Into My Arms' and 'People Ain't No Good', featured in the soundtrack to Shrek 2. For my part, it was "No More Shall We Part" which introduced to me to the dark delightful work of Mr.It’s such a gorgeous song that Peaches Geldof even has its lyrics tattooed on her (but don’t let that put you off).

As Cave stated, this was ‘the sort of record I’ve been wanting to make for years […] a record which is slow from beginning to end… Very sparse, very raw and beautiful.Cleary uncomfortable about the process of spinning one’s own feelings into poetic form he has often addressed the album as “a big heroic melodrama out of a bog-standard rejection. Amid the ashes of a world unable to exorcise its demons, Nick actually finds love; a strange, twisted, doomed love, perhaps--but love nevertheless. With only the sparest accompaniment--often just a piano or organ, light percussion and violin (courtesy of Dirty Three's Warren Ellis)- -Cave employs traditional folk song structure and simplicity to weave tales saddened less through tragedy than through emptiness. As the 1980s drew to a close Cave was deeply addicted to heroin and writing some of his darkest songs yet. By 1997, The Bad Seeds were an eight man strong operation, and yet they saw fit to release this album full of extremely intimate, stripped down, confessional music.