217: Tender Prey, by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (Australia)
Tender Prey (1988)
11 tracks, 54 minutes
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I don’t know why, but this album always makes me think of the Oliver Stone film Natural Born Killers. I reckoned it was because it may have been used as part of the soundtrack, but I looked it up and nope, no Nick Cave there at all. I think it must be because they both share a similar vibe, or maybe aesthetic. The most memorable and exciting moments of each are made up of an unsettlingly entertaining combination of ultra-violence and bleakness with a twinkle-eyed but pitch-black humour and a haunting beauty. Tender Prey’s songs are catchy like pop songs, but you won’t want to catch yourself idly singing these lyrics in public.

I really like the subversion of styles that Cave uses here, and things are never usually as they sound. ‘Deanna’ is an up-tempo gospel song that tells a gruesome story with a bug-eyed and manic delivery from all musicians involved; ‘Up Jumped the Devil’ is a work song suitable for mining brimstone in hell. The album is also relentless. There is a darkness to every single track in some way, whether it be subject matter, musically or just in the slightly weird and disturbing production. It’s also in the tracks themselves: both ‘The Mercy Seat’ and ‘Up Jumped the Devil’ end up in just a rolling and roiling jumble of sounds, repeated and overlapping phrases that get more and more demented the longer they tumble along together. As an exercise in atmosphere curation, Tender Prey is a masterwork.

And for all that, Cave doesn’t enjoy it at all. He’s been quoted as saying he doesn’t particularly like the songs, or the performances, or the production. His later disappointment (even revulsion?) in the result is a little understandable from a personal level – the album was made at a dark point in his life, at the height of his heroin abuse, living in a foreign country with a band wracked with disagreements and divisions. I reckon it’s natural to resent anything that comes from those origins. But those pressures somehow resulted in – from a neutral standpoint – an amazing album that reflects the darkness of its birth without seemingly any effect on its quality as a piece of art. This is not an album I could listen to every day. In fact, I’ve not listened to it for years. But when I do break it out, I revel in it all over again in disconcerted joy. Back into the CD rack for another few years, then.