Bone And Rag Man

You see a cadaverously skinny creature, like a death’s head Dr Seuss creation*, clad in the filthy remnants of a once finely-tailored suit leering and peering at you through red-rimmed eyes, poised awkwardly all pipe cleaner legs and too long arms, dirty jagged fingernails pointing dangerously in your direction, spittle flecking its mean thin lips.

The percussion is the sound of an ill-formed wight beating a cruel-looking little hammer on an upturned ribcage untimely ripped from a large beast you can’t quite place. The guitarist, elegantly ruined by pox, scrapes at a instrument of his own devising, five strings of razored wire taking its tribute in blood as he plays, cutting slippery and carmine. Drip-drip, sugar.

There are others up there playing, but you cannot quite process what they are, or once were. The sounds are thin and mighty, scratching at your sores and scabbed-over weaknesses. If it wasn’t ill-advised to show any weakness here at The Ripped Throat Inn, you would turn tail and flee. It is a shame you cannot, it might have saved your life tonight.

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Welcome to Nice Cave & The Bad Seeds From Her To Eternity, welcome to 1984, welcome to Hades and welcome to the beginning end.

After the Birthday Party disintegrated following Junkyard and the final EP Mr Cave, the band’s confrontational shaman with a very bad habit, frankly did not look like a good bet to last until Christmas, let alone be teetering on the cusp of a lengthy, vital and critically-lauded solo career; but he was. Drip-drip, sugar.

After some settling the nascent Bad Seeds comprised Mick Harvey, Hugo Race, Barry Adamson, Blixa Bargeld and Anita Lane when they cut their debut, with Jim Thirwell contributing, then departing. Cut? From Her To Eternity sounds positively exhumed.

Right from the off, a towering/lowering hard/slow cover of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Avalanche’, the die is cast. This is an attritional, antagonistic LP steeped in high gothic camp, darker than Bauhaus down a mineshaft. Cave sounds like a creature, something just sentient enough to sneer the words at you between the howls of lust-slaked pain and menace, before pivoting to something less dramatic and sadder.

The Bad Seeds provide Cave with exactly the right canvass, providing eerie atmospherics as well as lots of skeletal rattles, pin cushion arms and dental misery, coming at you out of the speakers. Barry Adamson’s bass is very much to the fore on several tracks, ‘Saint Huck’ especially, which stops it all getting too tinnitus inducing.

The best track here is Anita Lane-assisted title track, it is the sole glimpse of the future here. That piano pulse, the big drama, it even sounds like ‘Tupelo’ and bits of Murder Ballads in places. I love the wild, taut obsession that Cave sells us here, like no other could, squalls of noise happening almost off camera as he works himself into a frenzy of either hopeless adoration, or something more permanent. The image of the tears falling through the floorboards into his mouth … Drip-drip, sugar.

I love every toothache second of this album but my other highlights are:

• The chain gang chant of ‘Well Of Misery’ is a beautifully sad invention.
• The slobbering idiot anguish of ‘Saint Huck’, poor soul.
• ‘Wings Off Flies’, which actually sounds like someone removing their own skin to a rudimentary bump and grind beat.
• The unsettling rolling piano on ‘A Box For Black Paul’

So pretty much everything then.

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If you have the right tolerances From Her To Eternity is a wonderful LP. It sounds like someone took a filleting knife to it, slicing away anything too rock-sounding, anything too soft, too fleshy, leaving just the knucklebones and spine for you to cuddle up to.

I have owned it for 18 years now but only truly found my way into it in the last 4 or so. Playing it incredibly loud was the key, it’s an album that needs to hurt you to love you. Let it.

Drip-drip, sugar.

1092 Down.

PS: I want to talk to you about a girl

*The Stiff With a Quiff? The Ghoul In The Cagoul?