The Nick Cave Top 75 Countdown (#75-71) & This Week's Statistics

Hello, my friends, old and new! As the weekend comes to a close, another countdown begins. It concerns a man who is known to most of the world by his name alone, although he's been in groups practically all his professional life. He was born in Warracknabeal, Victoria, Australia, in 1957, but relocated to London along with his band in 1980. He is a musician, singer-songwriter, author, screenwriter, film-score composer, and occasional film actor, best known as the frontman of the rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, but also in other guises (The Birthday Party, Grinderman, The Boys Next Door, etc). We'll hear all of these during our countdown. Ladies and gentlemen, here is the man who is considered by many (including me) as the best songwriter to come out in the last 30-35 years: Nick Cave.

Nick Cave is an artist who has never shied away from exploring the darker side of the human experience, often in broadly gothic strokes on his early albums but with a growing degree of nuance and compassion as Cave and his work matured. But a very real and deeply painful tragedy was visited on Cave while he was working on his 16th solo album, Skeleton Tree. His 15-year-old son Arthur Cave died when he fell from a cliff in July 2015, and while the writing and recording was already underway when the youngster suffered his accident, the grief and pain of loss Cave felt is palpable throughout this album. Skeleton Tree is relatively modest in scale - it runs just 40 minutes, the cover artwork is minimal, and the music lacks the dramatic, grand-scale arrangements of Cave's albums of the 21st century. Nearly all of these songs feature spare, minimal melodies and low-key soundscapes that hover over beds of atonal electronic noise and sculpted static. And while the estimable talents of the Bad Seeds are on display here, on many tracks the final effect feels more like an author reading over ambient backing tracks than the sort of evocative sounds one might expect from Cave and his collaborators.

There is also the matter of Cave's voice. When he's reciting the lyrics rather that singing them, he sounds dead-eyed and numb – the opposite of the propulsive voice that snarled the spoken word sections of The Mercy Seat or Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! And when he sings, what comes out sounds strained and parched, drained of its usual power, but with a different, rather more difficult kind of potency in its place. It's most striking on I Need You, the song at #75 on our list, that boasts one of Skeleton Tree's most beautiful tunes. His voice transforms a lyric that, on another Nick Cave album, would be one more of its author's paeans to elusive women, into something else entirely: a desperate plea to someone not to lose themselves in fathomless misery.

It's a song propelled by a steady fuzzy synth line over which Cave sings an off-kilter melody that never quite syncs up to the music, but it's his observations that are significant: "Nothing really matters when the one you love is gone ... I need you." It's an ode to a woman in red, but the loss feels weightier than usual for Cave.

From his latest album with The Bad Seeds at #75, to his first album with The Birthday Party at #74, which is called The Birthday Party. Originally released in 1980 and credited to the Boys Next Door, that early incarnation of Nick Cave's Birthday Party had existed in the Australian punk scene from as early as 1973, and their debut album marks one of the most significant diversions in punk rock music of the era. The Birthday Party only lasted three years and produced an album trilogy that is surely one of the most influential catalogs in the genre, besides that of the Sex Pistols or the Clash.

By the turn of the millennium, Nick Cave had metamorphosed into one of the greatest balladeers of the era, but his deranged beginnings were as one of the most ferocious rock performers since Iggy Pop, with a voice as harrowing as Howlin' Wolf. The Birthday Party also sported one of the most extraordinary set of musicians, who seemed intent on redefining rock by poisoning its very essence. Mick Harvey, Tracy Pew, Phillip Calvert, and Rowland S. Howard made up the group which - by chance or virtue - could sound simultaneously inept and agile - a razor edge in which they crept with both skepticism and skill; the approach resulted in some of the most tense and threatening music put to record during the '80s.

The song at #74, Mr. Clarinet, displays some of Nick Cave's darkest lyrical content, attesting to the gothic tag later (unfittingly) thrown at the group.

At #73 is a song from Nocturama (2003) – Cave's twelfth album with the Bad Seeds. Still In Love is an old school murder ballad, locking horns with some of Cave's most virulent rage-blues in a decade. The lyrics echo this emotional disconnect:

"The cops are hanging around the house
The cars outside look like they've got the blues
The moon don't know if it's day or night
Everybody's creeping around with plastic covers on their shoes"

At #72 is a song found in the 2008 album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! After the masterpiece that was Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus in 2004, Cave and Warren Ellis scored a pair of films - The Proposition and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and recorded the self-titled Grinderman album with other bandmembers Martyn Casey and Jim Sclavunos. Grinderman was a howling, raucous, rock & roll racket of a set that sweat humorous garage rock blues and raw shambolic guttersnipe stroll that spread its nasty cheer to the listener. The return of the full-on Bad Seeds octet built on this energy and emerged with Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! - an album that is at once snarling, darkly humorous, decadently sexual, and, if you are a religious Christian person, seemingly blasphemous.

Ellis' moaning Gypsy violin, electric mandolin, a spooky Mick Harvey piano, and a one-two rhythm section shuffle offer another dark and hopeless love song in Jesus of the Moon (#72), but its drama and punch are almost theatrical in scope. It's dead serious, no camp here; it's all passion, pathos, and an unwillingness to let go despite the fact of having already done so. The last line in the song is, "I say hello." One wonders to what? The abandoned lover? Oblivion?

Finally for today, from the already mentioned Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus (2004), this is Easy Money. Easy Money is part of The Lyre of Orpheus, the much quieter, more elegant affair of the two. It is more consciously restrained, its attention to craft and theatrical flair more prevalent. But that doesn't make it any less satisfying.

Easy Money is quite possibly one of the few (the only?) songs by Nick Cave that allude to a gay theme. Just watch the lyrics:

"It's difficult. It's very tough.
I said to the man who'd been sleeping rough
To sit within a fragrant breeze
All among the nodding trees
That hang heavy with the stuff

He threw his arms around my neck
He brushed the tear from my cheek
And held my soft white hand
He was an understanding man
He did not even barely hardly speak

Easy money
Rain it down on the wife and the kids
Rain it down on the house where we live
Rain until you got nothing left to give
And rain that ever-loving stuff down on me

All the things for which my heart yearns
Gives joy in diminishing returns
He kissed me on the mouth
His hands they headed south
And my cheek it burned

Money, man, it is a bitch
The poor, they spoil it for the rich
With my face pressed in the clover
I wondered when this would be over
And at home we are all so guilty-sad"

Now, let's continue with last week's statistics; it was another amazing week, the number of weekly visits about the same as last time. All of the week's stories did great, especially Seven Movies, part 1. Two older stories that also did great were the ones concerning Freddie Jackson and Tevin Campbell. The two Oscar stories of last week did very well, and our previous Pink Floyd story also did well. Older stories are also doing well, George Maharis, the Disco crossover hits, Zelim Bakaev, Grace Jones, and Tevin Campbell are all in this week's top 10.

As far as countries are concerned, this week's top 10 is the same as last week, the only difference being that Russia, which had a very good week, moved from #9 to #3, forcing all the other countries from positions #3-#8 to move down one notch to make room for it. On the all-time list, all countries keep their positions but decrease their percentage, except for France, Russia, Italy, and Canada, which increase theirs.

Here are this week's Top 10 countries.

1. France

2. the United States

3. Russia

4. the United Kingdom

5. Greece

6. Italy

7. Canada

8. South Africa

9. Spain

10. Germany

Here are the other countries that graced us with their presence since our last statistics (alphabetically): Albania, Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, the Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belgium, Bermuda, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cayman Islands, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Finland, Ghana, Guyana, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Jamaica, Japan, Kenya, Kosovo, Kuwait, Liberia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Mexico, Mongolia, Morocco, Namibia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Romania, Singapore, Slovakia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Trinidad & Tobago, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, Vietnam, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Happy to have you all!

And here's the all-time Top 10:

1. the United States = 30.8%

2. France = 24.4%

3. the United Kingdom = 8.2%

4. Greece = 7.7%

5. Russia = 3.4%

6. Germany = 2.2%

7. Italy = 1.30%

8. Cyprus = 1.21%

9. Canada = 1.11%

10. the United Arab Emirates = 0.37%

That's all for today, folks. Till the next one!