Of the four albums reissued and remastered by Mute records, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ seminal debut, From Her to Eternity, is probably the most abrasive and difficult to digest. Coming off his stint as front-man for Australian noise-punk outfit The Birthday Party, Cave seemed intent to carry on in his former band’s atavistic tradition. Joined by, among others, fellow BP alum and lifelong collaborator Mick Harvey, Einsturzende Neubauten’s Blixa Bargled, and Magazine’s Barry Adamson, Cave crafted the ultimate fulfillment of The Birthday Party’s promise: a raw, wet lump of writhing passion; a barb-wire tangle of love, hate, desire, and repulsion. The Bad Seeds stripped the song down to its ramshackle elements, then pulled it inside-out to expose all the quivering viscera.
The album begins with a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Avalanche.” One of the darkest of the great songwriter’s early career, Cave peels back the tinkling guitar in favor of a slow, sleazy bassline and rolling, muffled drum fills courtesy of Harvey. The song crawls along on its belly under the weight of Cave’s rabid-animal snarl. The remastering has been particularly revealing for this track, which had been penalized for its menacing stillness in previous editions. “Avalanche” feeds directly into “Cabin Fever!” which, like the title track and “Saint Huck,” typifies the best of Cave’s earliest compositions. The song's central underpinning is a lurching bass figure, jarring and hypnotically repetitive; it cycles endlessly amid a cacophony of clattering drumsticks, free-form guitar shredding, and crashing cymbals. It’s one of Cave’s most harrowing vocal performances, too. He flits back and forth between ragged shrieks, squeals, and growls, conflating the experience of a seafarer going slowly mad with the singer’s own romantic turmoil (fueled, most likely, by his volatile relationship with fellow singer and occasional collaborator, Anita Lane). What makes the song so brilliant is that it presents a series of rising motions with no actual climax. In doing so, Cave creates an atmosphere of pure anxiety, of frustrated desire, a world of violent emotion from which release is unattainable. The music actually functions as a gateway into the artist’s psychological state.
"From Her to Eternity" is perhaps the most celebrated track on the album, a staple in The Bad Seed’s live set up through the ‘90s. Co-written with Lane, Cave narrates the speaker’s obsession with a woman who lives above him. The song presents some of his most vivid and unsettling imagery: “I hear her walking/ walking barefoot cross the boards/ all through this lonesome night/ I hear her crying too/ The tears come splashing down/ leaking through the cracks/ and down upon my face/ I catch ‘em in my mouth.” For four and a half minutes, the song teeters on the edge of destruction, often with only a simple, pounding piano theme holding the thing together. Bargled’s guitar lashes out periodically throughout, squalling, gnashing, and occasionally obscuring the vocals like a tangible outburst of the speaker’s id. It is followed, fittingly, by “Saint Huck.” Like the title track from Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!, “Huck” revolves around the displacement of its protagonist -- in this case Twain’s Huck Finn -- into a depraved, morally bankrupt contemporary setting. “Saint Huck,” however, is pervaded by a wholly different sense of humor from “Lazarus.” Absent is the wry wit or the irony, and in its place is the humor of the Underground Man: confessional, self-debasing, squirm-inducing.
While “Cabin Fever!” and “From Her to Eternity” were the full fruition of Cave’s early work, other tracks offered glimpses of where the band was yet to go. “Well of Misery” is a masterpiece of minimalist blues that Cave would explore more fully in The Firstborn Is Dead. “A Box for Black Paul” continues in the same vein, with Cave crooning over the death and burial of a small-town, Southern intellectual to the sparse sounds of his own barely-melodic piano accompaniment. At over nine minutes, it’s one of his most challenging compositions, but also one of his most haunting for its bleak depiction of the human condition. “Just who will dig the hole/ when you’re done ransacking his room/ grabbing any damn thing that shines?/ And throw the scraps down on the street/ like all his books and his notes/ all his books and his notes/ and all the junk that he wrote/ Whole fuckin lot right up in smoke.” Mortality, the tenuousness of community, the insufficiency of art to provide paths to transcendence -- these are the themes swirling around in that piano vortex.
More than a collection of songs, From Her to Eternity is an incarnation of late 20th century anxiety and confusion in the tradition of Eliot and Ginsberg, and it is finally being presented with the fidelity it deserves. The improved quality should make this a worthwhile purchase down the road for audiophiles who already own the 1994 CD transfer. Newcomers to Cave would be advised to look elsewhere for a first look, but for anyone who appreciates music capable of drawing the listener into its own subjective state, From Her to Eternity will be an ecstatic and revelatory experience.
Disc 1:
1. Avalanche
2. Cabin Fever!
3. Well of Misery
4. From Her to Eternity
5. Saint Huck
6. Wings off Flies
7. Box for Black Paul
Disc 2 (DVD):
1. Avalanche
2. Cabin Fever!
3. Well of Misery
4. From Her to Eternity
5. Saint Huck
6. Wings off Flies
7. Box for Black Paul
8. In the Ghetto
9. Moon Is in the Gutter
10. From Her to Eternity (1987 Version)
11. Do You Love Me Like I Love You, Pt. 1
12. In the Ghetto
