Murder Ballads
by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

From badseed 04/01/2018 21:01 | #212136 | TOP COMMENT Vote up your preferred comments and the comments with the most votes will be flagged.

So I'm currently working at an Applebees as a server. They have one of those TouchTunes jukeboxes and I just downloaded the app for it. That way I can play music without being judged by others for my superior taste. Around 11 PM I played "Stagger Lee" and followed it up with "O'Malley's Bar." It was fun watching the reactions of the forty or so customers in the building. When Cave exclaims that his "dick felt long and hard" there was an uproar of laughter (incidentally most rap music is banned on there due to the lyrics but most other explicit music is still available). The only person that seemed to be having a cow about it was the bartender. She's such a lamestain. But the best part is they had no idea it was me, I'm off work today, and it's April Fools Day. And it's Easter so there's gonna be a lot of churchgoing families eating out. I'm probably gonna drive up there and to a couple other places with the jukebox, without even getting out of the car, just to hit them with some unexpected savagery. (Edited)

Great collection of songs about murder.

O'Malley's Bar is great; the collaborations with P.J. Harvey and Kylie Minogue are top notch; Stagger Lee is brilliant; and Bob Dylan would have been proud to write The Curse of Millhaven.

Great stuff all round. (Edited)

From Onater 07/01/2017 20:11 | #193537 | TOP COMMENT Vote up your preferred comments and the comments with the most votes will be flagged.

It's hard to believe that, of all of his albums, this was Nick Cave's most commercially successful. Imagine all of the soccer moms that bought it because of the single with Kylie Minogue only to hear something like Stagger Lee!

Murder ballads, was one of Nick Cave's most successful albums, mainly due to the hit single duet with his Australian counterpart Kylie Minogue. The album itself is a darkly humorous blood fest with a severely high body count. There's some great moments here, from the opening track, song of joy, to the hilarious profanity of second cut, Stagger Lee. The Minogue duet, where the wild roses grow, is nice enough, as is the PJ Harvey collaboration, Henry Lee. O'Malley's bar, is probably a little overlong, but the Bob Dylan cover, death is not the end, is fun, as all the guest vocalists, including Shane McGowan, get a line or two, turning Dylan's dreadful, down in the groove, track into a half decent song. All in all, another fine Nick Cave record.

Great album. Epic stories envisioning horrific events. A true bard of the darker scale. His crooning is hypnotizing yet so gentle amid morbid tales. 'Death is not the end' is my personal pick of the bunch. His song writing and vocals make him one of a kind. Original brilliance.