Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds The Firstborn Is Dead

Still establishing his musical identity following The Birthday Party’s dissolution, Nick Cave decamped to Berlin in 1985 to cut the second Bad Seeds album as a quartet after the departure of early members Hugo Race and Anita Lane. Adding to the disparate feel of a record made by an Australian artist who’d been living in London finding artistic sanctuary in Germany, The Firstborn Is Dead is also steeped in raw American blues. The album opens with Cave describing Elvis Prseley’s birth on a storm-wracked night on “Tupelo”, which also riffs on a John Lee Hooker song and a Lead Belly motif. It’s a striking vocal exorcism, even for the famously animated singer. Cave continues to wear his influences firmly on his sleeve for the rest of the record, adapting the ominous “Wanted Man” from a Johnny Cash tune penned by Bob Dylan, while “Blind Lemon Jefferson” is a striking vignette of the titular blues singer. Beyond the rickety, threadbare instrumentation throughout—including his wheezing harmonica—Cave’s voice contorts in memorable ways, from his desperate gasp in parts of “Tupelo” to how he opens “Train Long Suffering” with a whoop like a locomotive whistle. With a songwriting credit for versatile multi-instrumentalist (and fellow Birthday Party alum) Mick Harvey, “Say Goodbye to the Little Girl Tree” has the feeling of rustic outsider art while showcasing Blixa Bargeld’s haunting slide guitar. “Knockin’ On Joe” is an especially powerful demonstration of Cave’s vocal range, as he affects the guise of a sorrowful old-world blues singer. He does something similar on “Black Crow King”, humming and hollering with his bandmates echoing him in call-and-response fashion before falling into moody spoken word. The band would double down on dissecting their forebears on the following year’s covers album Kicking Against the Pricks, tackling Cash and Hooker as well as The Velvet Underground and Roy Orbison. Cash would even return the favour, covering The Bad Seeds’ “The Mercy Seat” in 2000 before enlisting Cave for a stark duet on Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” in 2002. Cave’s youthful restlessness saw him give up Berlin for brief stays in New York and São Paulo before he eventually settled on (and in) the English seaside town of Brighton in the new millennium.