Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Murder Ballads - 1h 9m 31s

Tracks & Durations

1. Song Of Joy	6:49
2. Stagger Lee	5:17
3. Henry Lee	4:00
4. Lovely Creature	4:15
5. Where The Wild Roses Grow	3:59
6. The Curse Of Milhaven	6:57
7. The Kindness Of Strangers	4:41
8. Crow Jane	4:16
9. O'Malley's Bar	14:30
10. Death Is Not The End	4:31
11. Outtake - Opium Tea	5:33
12. The World's A Girl - I love You ... Nor Do I	4:37

Note: The information about this album is acquired from the publicly available resources and we are not responsible for their accuracy.

Review

Nick Cave's been writing songs about killing and other evil things since he first surfaced in 1980 as the Birthday Party's pale, skinny, goth-punk Jim Morrison. But the murder ballads that provide this set's title are different, tantalizingly deliberate. Sure, there's plenty of trademark Cave here, but Murder Ballads is a fascinating concept album that uses the narrative ballad form of the English folk tradition to tell of murder: random deaths, passion crimes, and killing sprees, all in one package. Cave clearly thrives in this genre, and he produces some of his sharpest and most facile writing to date. "Song of Joy," a genuinely scary campfire mystery of a murdered family and an unnamed killer, chillingly weaves clues into the lyrics, while "Where the Wild Roses Grow" is a narrative duet in which killer (Cave) and victim (pop star Kylie Minogue) reveal parallel tales. Cave even shows his knack for adaptation on Bob Dylan's "Death Is Not the End": he recontextualizes a song of heavenly comfort into a sort of zombie "We Are the World" (featuring Minogue, PJ Harvey, Shane MacGowan, and others) in which "death is not the end" of pain and suffering. Above all, Murder Ballads should be heard as a work of pulp fiction--as sensationally funny as it is harrowing. The already violent traditional song "Stagger Lee" becomes gangsta folk, so ridiculously packed with obscenity and brutality it would make the Geto Boys cringe. And Cave's (unintentional?) point to would-be censors--that bad-ass songs existed long before rappers polluted the airways--should not be missed. --Roni Sarig

Other Versions

Albums are mined from the various public resources and can be actually the same but different in the tracks length only. We are keeping all versions now.

Murder Ballads

Tracks: 10 (-2 tracks), Disk length: 59m (-11m 29s)

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