The Birthday Party is the band from which Nick Cave emerged; relatively short-lived, this is their second, and last, album. My sense of Cave from his later work is of a deep-voiced deliverer of slow dark ballads, but here he’s a lot livelier, if no less dark.
Imagine if Tom Waits, Jim Morrison, and
Iggy Pop got blended together in a terrible teleportation accident. That’s what
you get here. She’s Hit has the slurred and loose and bluesy nature of Waits,
punctuated by clashes of percussion from Phill Calvert, and lyrically it’s one of Cave’s
beloved murder ballads.
On Hamlet (Pow Pow Pow), Cave’s voice takes
on the growl of Waits, the nihilism of Iggy, and the manic energy of Morrison,
reverting to yelps and screams. The whole band exudes the paradoxical dichotomy
of deranged chaos and tightly controlled noise of The Velvet Underground, or
the sinister menace of The Doors (Several Sins, for example, taking on the form
of People Are Strange).
It’s not your classic punk, it’s not goth,
it’s something else dark and weird. The whole album got a bit wearing - it’s
just that level of amped-up angst and fury – but any individual track? Excellent.
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