SOUNDTRACK: NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS-“As I Sat Sadly By Her Side” (2001).
Nick Hornby reviewed Cave’s album No More Shall We Part in may of 2001. I had listened to the album a lot back then but hadn’t in a while. I found that I enjoyed it just as much now as I did back then. although I feel it suffers a bit from excess. At 52 minutes, there’s a song or two too many.
But I was dismayed at the way Hornby dismissed this opening song.
“As i Sadly Sadly By Her Side” is a storytelling song with a repeated refrain. While it is true that there is no chorus, there is certainly a catchy repeated moment.
The song starts with a terrific slow bass line. It is staggered and smooth at the same time. A pretty piano melody sprinkles through as he sings.
There is drama in the song and it slow grows more intense as the strings are added in. Intense is a relative word to be sure, as the intensity goes from maybe 2 to 4 out of ten, but even that small increase does provide drama.
It is an intensely personal moment between two people–unlike just about any other song I’ve heard.
[READ: September 20, 2019] “Sweet Misery”
This essay is subtitled “The mellowing of Nick Cave.” This was written in 2001. Imagine what it would be called if it was written today.
The mellowing refers to his then new album No More Shall We Part which Hornby says is “in patches, so transcendentally beautiful that one can be forgiven a small spasm of impatience: if he had this in him, why did he waste all of those years shouting at people?”
Hornby begins by talking about the ubiquity of pop music in 2001. How when he was fifteen it was hard to hear the music he liked. But now (in 2001), if you’re fifteen you can hear it figuratively anywhere. [In 2019, it is literally anywhere].
Cave’s records with The Birthday Party (in the later 1970s) were “a punk-inspired and self-consciously apocalyptic noise whose main purpose, apparently, was to terrify the audience into submission.”
With the Bad Seeds, Hornby is happy to report, Cave has become less ragged without succumbing to the blandness of most adult rock.
He loves the opening of the first song, “As I Sat Sadly By Her Side” (“a spooked response to Van Morrison’s good-Karma classic “Astral Weeks” and in white pop you don’t get anything much prettier than that”). But he says the rest of the song doesn’t live up to the introduction. At more than six minutes it doesn’t feel like we are being taken on a magical journey:, “Cave just plows dutifully through one verse after another…as if he were eating an overfilled plate of decent but plain food.”
Despite this comment (which I disagree with), he says one must be drawn to the lyrics. which seem better suited to to the nineteenth century European stage than to a twenty first century CD. This I agree with, but Hornby seems to think this is a bad thing.
He dismisses Cave’s ponderous tongue twisters, but surely, it is Cave’s delivery of these lengthy multi-syllabic lines which break the rhythm of the simple musical structures that make the lyrics sparkle and shine and transport you.
I do like Hornby’s assertion that in “Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow” when the narrator asks someone to “put down that telephone” it sounds
comically anachronistic; there are very few contemporary rockers who can’t pull off a reference to a phone call, but somehow Cave has managed to put himself in that select group.
But he forgives Cave all of this for the beauty of the title song. Both the lyrics and the album’s “secret weapon: the heavenly voices of his backup singers, Kate and Anna McGarrigle.”
I love that he says even the most imaginative party host wouldn’t have seated cave next to the McGarrigles. But the McGarrigles have always sounded as if they’d “be more comfortable in an earlier, less comfortable age.”
It’s all true, their voices are stunning on this record. Hornby singles out “Hallelujah” (thankfully not the Leonard Cohen song) and “Love Letter” as highlights.
However, he says the rest of the album works theatrically rather than musically. While I agree with at that assessment, we disagree on its greatness. Because he feels that most of the album will not fit into “the small corners of the average day you might reserve for rock music” or that a song like “God is in the House” is “another song you wouldn’t want to set on repeat Play.” Who only saves “small corners” for rock. And the greatness of this album is repeated play.
Yet despite this criticism, he ends on a positive note. When even the angriest most intimidating hip-hop or heavy metal seems designed to sell us something, Cave’s music doesn’t seem remotely interested on selling anything. It’s his and it’s ours and for that we should be thankful.
I was really excited to see Nick Cave that fall–my first experience of a live Nick Cave show. And then 9/11 happened, and Nick cancelled his U.S. tour. It took 18 years for me to see him live.
Leave a Reply