The saga of Nick Cave didn’t begin with the Bad Seeds or the Birthday Party–not even with the man himself. Its genesis lies instead in the first chapter of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita, which Cave’s father, a high school English teacher, read aloud to him shortly after his 12th birthday inside their house in a small town in Victoria, Australia. Cave later recalled his father transforming with every recited syllable, a mortal under the spell of the written word. “I felt like I was being initiated into this secret world,” he said, “The world of sex and adulthood and art.” Cave’s naturally didn’t grasp the intricacies of Nabokov’s masterpiece at his tender age, but the young man’s encounter with Lolita’s sordid romanticism and melodic prose constituted his coming-of-age and his artistic awakening.
Cave’s new box set Lovely Creatures: The Best Of Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds is a testament to the literary soul of his music. The deluxe edition assumes the form of a case-bound, 36-page book of essays and photos (256 pages in the super deluxe edition, packaged separately), bundled alongside 3 CDs and a DVD comprising concert footage and band interviews. While technically a compilation, it’s easier to think of the release as a novel in three parts, detailing Cave’s evolution from obscure goth-rocker, to Americana deconstructor, to rock’s very own Nabokov, all while honoring the Seeds who joined him for the long, slow march to the pantheon.
Disc one details the band’s early years in the mid-’80s and early ’90s and the growing pains therein. The seething title track to 1984’s From Her To Eternity is the perfect opening chapter; the vestiges of Birthday Party’s post-punk in its arrangement (the dread-laden piano plunks, the spooky poetry, the incessant dissonance) show that Cave and company had yet to come into their own. In time, they moved to Berlin, drifting away from rudimentary din to gothic grandeur over the span of their next five albums, whose contents comprise the bulk of the disc. Ironically, the first of these Berlin-brewed albums, The Firstborn Is Dead (1985), marked the beginnings of Cave’s love affair with Southern blues. The romance was inevitable: Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, et al. were the original murder balladeers, tragedians strumming similar tales of blood, sweat, and sin. Accordingly, 1986’s covers album Kicking Against The Pricks (represented here by the Seeds’ take on Hooker’s “I’m Gonna Kill That Woman”) found the Seeds honoring their thematic forebears.
A few months after the tribute, Cave’s creative loci shifted yet again. Frequently regarded as the band’s opus, Your Funeral, My Trial found the Seeds welding the blues to the pre-existing, cabaret-tinged balladry of his debut, recasting the aloof artist as a funhouse-mirror version of the everyman. Consider “Scum,” the album’s seething indictment of “a miserable shit-wringing turd.” The climactic highlight is typically regarded as Cave’s clap-back at his former roommate, journalist Mat Snow (according to the Snow's account, a disgruntled Cave revealed him as the song's subject during a tense conversation following Snow’s pre-emptive criticism of The Firstborn Is Dead). Upon closer examination, however, the purported autobiography reveals itself as a condemnation of the traitor immemorial, fueled through historical allusion (“Judas, Brutus, Vitus”) and grotesque imagery (“He said that I looked pale and thin/I told him he looked fat/His lips were red and lickin’ wet/His house was roastin’ hot/In fact it was a fuckin’ slum”). With the fluid, genre-blurring, Your Funeral, My Trial, and its follow-up Tender Prey (1988), Cave challenged our notions of the blues as a static art form; its modern incarnation called for innovation, not just appropriation.
Lovely Creatures proceeds on to the band’s halcyon days in the mid ’90s—a period that saw Cave’s apotheosis as a world-renowned auteur. Let Love In (1994) and The Boatman’s Call (1997) are the most well-represented here with four tracks apiece, and for good reason. Along with 1996’s Murder Ballads, these three albums provide the most compelling evidence for Cave’s storied reputation. Here, we observe Cave coming into his own as a storyteller, an echo of the awakening he experienced as a child. His formalistic shift from poetry to prose positions “Do You Love Me?” “Stagger Lee,” and “Red Right Hand” as metaphysical novels rather than songs, where the forces of sex and death grapple for supremacy. The spirit of the old Romantics is alive and well, too: namely, their ceaseless search for sublime love, the only solace in a world of pain. “There’s a man who spoke wonders/Though I’ve never met him,” he groans on “(Are You) The One I've Been Waiting For?” invoking Christ’s chaste wisdom as he anticipates his lovers’ arrival. Two tracks apiece from No More Shall We Part (2001) and Nocturama (2003) round out the proceedings, but their overblown drama pales in comparison to the preceding panorama, the apex of Cave’s compilation, and arguably, his entire career.
By the time their 20th anniversary rolled around in 2004, Cave and company’s primordial madness had long since cooled, earning them a heretofore unimaginable reputation among critics as a beacon of gothic melodrama. In fact, during this interim—2004 to 2013, chronicled on the final disc—the old Seeds ceased to exist. The departure of original keyboardist/guitarist Blixa Bargeld one year prior to 2004’s double album Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus left behind an unmistakable void, particularly on the LP’s intimate latter half (“Breathless,” “Babe, You Turn Me On,” “O Children”). The void deepens with five selections from 2007’s Americana doomsday spell Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, Harvey’s final outing with the band. It’s somewhat of an underwhelming swan song for him, considering the frequency with which Warren Ellis’ violins take center stage (most spectacularly on the LP’s haunting, hymnal eight-minute closer, “More News From Nowhere”).
Four highlights from 2013’s Push The Sky Away ("We No Who U R," "Jubilee Street," "Higgs Boson Blues," and the title track) provide a fitting conclusion to Lovely Creatures’ majestic arc: the polar opposite of “From Her To Eternity,” a profound juxtaposition. And yet, however satisfying the collection’s finale, listeners who’ve kept up with Cave in the four years following Push The Sky Away will undoubtedly walk away from the experience a bit unsettled: not because the music itself is engineered to do so, but because Cave omits Skeleton Tree—his most powerful monument to death and grief—from the Seeds saga. Perhaps, this absence is owed to timing (Lovely Creatures was in progress when Cave’s son Arthur died). Consider Skeleton Tree, then, an epilogue to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ triumphant journey.
All chronologies are stories by definition, but when it comes to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, such a descriptor proves laughably insufficient. Their trajectory encompasses not just a band’s career, but a perversion of the monomyth that resides in all of our brains. Instead of King Arthur or Odysseus, we have Cave, a chain-smoking, gunslinging poet who sees God in the eyes of a woman and bowls of soup; who stalks through Berlin boudoirs with heroin in his veins, daring the devil to take him by the Red Right Hand only to dodge his scythe like a stuntman; who sifts through puddles of blood and piles of money in search of meaning, only to be greeted by the void. “The spiritual quest has many faces–religion, art, drugs, work, money, sex,” he mused, addressing 1998 Vienna Poetry Festival, “but rarely does the search serve God so directly, and rarely are the rewards so great in doing.” Lovely Creatures presents the definitive display of these anguished labors and sweet fruits they bore over twenty years—an unmovable feast, immortalized.
