Talk Talk—Spirit of Eden

Talk Talk—Spirit of Eden

Spirit of Eden—Though U2's similar Eno-infused rock soundscapes came years prior, Talk Talk's shift from synthpop to art music was surprising. Almost no artist in that vein headed for the ditch—Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, Eurythmics—and others simply made compromises, such as the jagged-yet-accessible stylings of Devo or Gary Numan. Talk Talk was more primed for that shift, considering singer Mark Hollis was more thoughtful and sensitive than his contemporaries. The songs on The Party's Over (1982), It's My Life (1984), and The Colour of Spring (1986) were far from banal, even in the earliest stages—cheaply done perhaps, but the craft just kept getting keener and tighter. Producer Tim Friese-Greene's occasional songwriting input blossomed into a full-blown symbiosis with Hollis, which sharpened Hollis' vision, resulting in more adventurous micromanagement; as a result, The Colour of Spring utilized twice as many session musicians as any other Talk Talk album.

It didn't so much sound like radical change was taking place, but Talk Talk was growing, and Colour of Spring's sales (their best-selling album), along with hit single "Life's What You Make It," gave them more freedom for the follow-up, Spirit of Eden. Hollis said, "Spirit of Eden—I kind of think that was very much, in a way, where all those earlier albums were trying to get to" (1998 TV interview, Okay Tone), and that was shrewd introspection; Eden's personnel—that is to say the band's discrete number of instruments—were pared down from Colour of Spring's line-up, though thanks to shrewd editing and a wider variety of sounds, it doesn't at all seem so. Hollis and Friese-Greene took the resulting recordings and played with each bit of tape until the album's six extended cuts were complete—Hollis being a proponent of first takes: "If you demo a track, no matter how badly you tried to demo it, there will always be a quality within it that you subsequently would try to recreate, which you shouldn't be."

As a result of this holistic approach, Spirit of Eden feels very cohesive, and in fact the first three songs form their own suite, led by the sparkling "The Rainbow," where Hollis sings of justice. The music evokes the intermittently pleasant uncertainty of a circadian rhythm, with certain segments alternating in intensity and length, and how nature and emotion are constantly at odds. The bittersweet "Eden" alternates between promise and mourning—the aural manifestation of a letdown. "Desire," the most rock-oriented tune, fittingly mimics an oncoming storm, yet is defiant; without cracking a smile, Hollis quips, "That ain't me, babe/I'm just content to relax/Than drown within myself," highlighting the sad pointlessness of obsession.

The dirge "Inheritance" exposes the excesses of humanity: "Don't you know where life has gone/Burying progress in the clouds" He subtly digs at faith-based living ("Expecting the dour/To redress with open arms/Ascension in incentive end"), calling the collective "Nature's son," implying accountability and a misguided need for what he describes as "Desperately befriending the crowd/To incessantly drive on/Dress in gold's surrendering gown." The achingly beautiful "I Believe in You" is an uncharacteristically explicit anti-heroin song completed just before Hollis' brother Ed's death by overdose: wondrously dissonant, with the chorus hitting C♯ being one of the most satisfying moments in popular music. The closing hymn "Wealth" is a sentimental resignation to fate which posits that ultimately, Hollis' misgivings about life in general are tempered by his acceptance of powerlessness.

Spirit of Eden didn't showcase anything particularly groundbreaking—the jazz tones and meticulous editing recall Miles Davis' Bitches Brew and Soft Machine's Third—but rather than embracing an experimental bent, Talk Talk polished their recordings to create something not only challenging but profoundly, undeniably gorgeous from start to finish. It stands as not only their high-water mark, but a dazzling achievement in music.

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds—Tender Prey

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds—Tender Prey

Tender Prey—The late 1980s were a busy time for Nick Cave. He and the Bad Seeds appeared in Der Himmel über Berlin as themselves, playing "The Carny" from their latest album, Your Funeral... My Trial (1986), he co-wrote the script and music of and starred in Ghosts... of the Civil Dead, and published both a book of collected works (King Ink, named for the Birthday Party song) and a novel (And the Ass Saw the Angel). The stress from all of it plus steady recording and touring took its toll on Cave and the band. Interviews from that time period paint Cave as paranoid, drug-addled, and nasty, and while some of it was certainly editorialization, Cave's long affair with heroin has been documented. Thus, Tender Prey came out messy, but ironically, it produced some of the band's most iconic songs.

Cave played a prison inmate in Ghosts... of the Civil Dead, and so being in that mindset wrote a number of prison songs for Tender Prey, though the subject was not entirely new for the band, whose prior album The Firstborn Is Dead (1985) was influenced by outlaw country. One of these songs is Cave's signature song, "The Mercy Seat," which is presented here in its original extended format, played at nearly every Bad Seeds concert since its creation. It's almost impossible to distinguish the instruments from one another at first—the ongoing march of Thomas Wydler's drums is surrounded by the weeping strings and Blixa Bargeld's barely audible slide guitar, occasionally flooded by Mick Harvey's and new member Roland Wolf's murderous guitar leads—to say nothing of Cave's lyrics, which make at least one offhanded reference to And the Ass Saw the Angel (or perhaps vice-versa) and depict a Christ-like figure who is set to die in the electric chair. The creepily sultry "Up Jumped the Devil" is quintessential Cave ("My blood was blacker than the chambers of a dead nun's heart") that takes its name either from Robert Johnson's "Preachin' Blues (Up Jumped the Devil)" or the lyrics to "The Devil Went down to Georgia" (likely the former, considering Tender Prey's heavy blues context).

Bad Seeds standard "Deanna" is a reworking of "Oh Happy Day," which is better exemplified by the acoustic version that was later appended as a bonus 7" to The Good Son (1990). Its unclear story combines crass sex with crass murder; in live shows, Cave sings with more venom: "She was my fuckin' friend/She was my fuckin' partner," making it sound scornful rather than jaunty. "Watching Alice" is something of a murky failure, whose languid arrangement is even less interesting than the banal lyrics. The toiling "Mercy" is one of the better forgotten Bad Seeds songs, as is "City of Refuge," based on Blind Willie Johnson's "(I'm Gonna Run to) the City of Refuge" (itself based on the traditional "You Better Run"). "Slowly Goes the Night" is a quiet highlight, sending up schlock balladry Bad Seeds-style while retaining a certain charm in spite of itself. The clopping "Sunday's Slave" and onrush of "Sugar Sugar Sugar" are two of the album's more understated moments, although the former is stronger than that suggests. The waning drunkenness of "New Morning" bids farewell to the hellish themes of the album and foreshadows the direction of The Good Son.

The first phase of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' career (pre-The Boatman's Call [1997]) is often referred to as Cave's Old Testament period; never was that more fitting than with Tender Prey (Birthday Party albums aside). Although it's a messy record, and many of the songs were not performed or arranged optimally, as a sort of blueprint, it's rather solid. Some of the group's (and the Birthday Party's) earlier work was unfavorably circumspect, and the relative straightforwardness of Tender Prey was refreshing. It's not the best LP of that aforementioned period, but it's close, and it was the most rock and roll the band ever got during the Blixa Bargeld era.

More Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds reviews by The Old Noise:

From Her to Eternity (1984)
The Firstborn Is Dead (1985)
Kicking Against the Pricks (1986)
Your Funeral... My Trial (1986)
Tender Prey (1988)
The Good Son (1990)
Henry's Dream (1992)
Live Seeds (1993)
Let Love In (1994)
Murder Ballads (1996)
The Boatman's Call (1997)
No More Shall We Part (2001)
Nocturama (2003)
Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus (2004)
Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! (2008)
Push the Sky Away (2013)