Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Nocturama Review

Overall Rating

Where do I start?

As with just about every Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds album I own (and that's a lot of cds!) Nocturama has taken a while to seep into my subconscious. It is, pretty much, typical Nick Cave fare - a mixture of sincere and touching ballads about love and loss featuring unusual descriptions and metaphors as well as songs about death and the badness of man. There's the goth imagery and the descriptions of weird southern culture and biblical references which populate all his work, giving it his own unique flavour and which no other songwriter could use to such effect.

Having said that, I've been listening to this album quite a lot as of late and I'm only now, a few years on from actually purchasing it, starting to realise how truly magnificent it is, even in the great scheme of Nick Cave magnificent (has he ever done anything less?).

My two favourite moments on this record are "Bring it On" a rather fast-paced and intense love ballad which essentially says that he is so tied to his partner that whatever the future holds or she can throw at him, he can take. The other is "God is in the House," a song he wrote about a small, Southern American town which he visited on his honeymoon. I initially found this track rather annoying, but after repeated listens, and witnessing him performing it live, I've come round to its brilliance. It's one of those slow, musically simple piano ballads that he does so well about a town untouched by the crime and corruption of the big city but with it's own demons in the shadows.

Nick Cave albums are always worth buying because every song has a hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck-standing-up moment. Nocturama is no different.