Most rarities compilations are chockablock with inferior alternate takes, half-assed covers, one-off soundtrack contributions, dead-end experiments, and tracks that were left off proper albums for good reason. Compiled by Bad Seed Mick Harvey, B-Sides and Rarities contains all of those things from every dark corner of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' 20-plus year career, but it still proves a better retrospective than the equally matter-of-factly titled The Best of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
This discrepancy might be surprising, but coming from the Aussie boogeyman and his henchmen, it seems perfectly fitting, perhaps even inevitable. Since his days with the Birthday Party, Cave has nurtured an almost academic obsession with the underbelly of society and the basest of human urges, populating his songs with murderers, rapists, and rogues doing their God-appointed jobs and arguing moral issues as justification. So it's wholly appropriate that the underbelly of Cave's own career should itself be so fascinating.
Those characters stake their claim to the first two disks, especially the tracks culled from the eras of The First Born Is Dead and Murder Ballads. "Scum" is a kiss-off to a "fuckin' traitor, chronic masturbator, shitlicker, user, self-abuser" who apparently had the temerity to give Cave a bad review. Cave revives the beauty-inspired killer of "Where the Wild Roses Grow", with Bad Seed Blixa Bargeld singing Kylie Minogue's part, and there are four installments of the ultraviolent "O'Malley's Bar". But the best murder ballad (even if it is a stretch to consider it as such) is "(I'll Love You) Till the End of the World" from the 1991 Wim Wenders film Until the End of the World. Cave's not a lunatic on a killing spree; he's a lovelorn bombmaker, and he caps this cinematic story of devotion with a spirited sing-along.
As a writer and especially as a vocalist, Cave understands and appreciates the power of overstatement, and these seldom-heard rarities strike a resonant chord because they make no virtue of subtlety. Singing like he's Jesse Garon Presley, Cave writes the messages of "God's Hotel" and "Jack the Ripper" in all caps, bolded, underlined...in blood. As a result, the violence of his songs-- physical, moral, and emotional-- is all the more grotesque and haunting, and the three-disk format of B-Sides and Rarities gives him an enormous canvas for his scrawled screeds.
It would be negligent, if not outright criminal, not to mention the Bad Seeds, who could very well be the focus of B-Sides and Rarities. Over the years they have proved themselves a remarkable and reliable backing band-- perhaps one of the best in rock history-- possessed of a dynamic range and intuitive sophistication without which Cave could not possibly achieve his lofty ambitions. The diversity of styles and moods they master over the course of these three disks is truly impressive, from the Sun Studio minimalism of the first three tracks to the lurching menace of "Black Betty" and "King Kong Kitchee Kitchee Ki-Mi-O", from the sinister soundtrack flourishes of "Cocks and Asses" and "Red Right Hand (Scream 3 version)" to the gentle restraint of Boatman's Call-era tracks like "Black Hair (Band Version)". In culling material for this compilation, Harvey consciously excluded any of Cave's solo work from the tracklist (only one song, the baroque "Time Jesum Traseuntum Et Non Riverentum" from the X-Files compilation, does not feature the Bad Seeds, although it does feature sometime Bad Seed Warren Ellis' band the Dirty Three). As a result, B-Sides and Rarities is as much the band's show as it is Cave's, which may be the key to this collection's dark sense of adventure.
