King Ink II – Review

King Ink II

by Nick Cave (2.13.61 Publications)
by William Ham

As the incredibly imaginative title implies, King Ink II is the sequel to Doommaster Cave’s first volume of lyrics, prose, and plays (also available from 2.13.61), picking up literally where the last one left off, with the majestic death-row saga “The Mercy Seat,” and following his black muse from there to the present day containing almost every original song from his albums from Tender Prey (1988) to this year’s The Boatman’s Call, baiting it (again) with soundtrack contributions, unreleased songs, a little prose, and facsimiles of pages from his notebook. (Nick’s not what you’d call a prolific guy – it’s highly likely that this book encompasses everything he’s completed in the last nine years.) Like most sequels, it’s a little more problematic than the original – where his early writings practically smoldered on the page, fueled by the fires of a creativity so intense as to be practically self-immolating, the past decade was a time of retrenchment, a refinement of the original fury into a more considered struggle with the contrasting forces tugging at both ends of his soul – the bloom of love and its attendant decay, the blessed and the profane, the smokescreen of literary language and the beautiful, awful clarity of plain speech.

Around the time that this volume kicks off, Cave had channeled most of his hyper-verbal ambitions into a novel, the brilliant And the Ass Saw the Angel, freeing him somewhat from the compulsion to squeeze a book’s worth of narrative into every song, plumping for (relative) simplicity and the increased strength of his voice to provide the passion that he once hid in an avalanche of words. This approach both enlarged his audience and sparked rebellion in the press, which has rarely dealt kindly with maturation; witness the drubbing Cave received for the likes of The Good Son, a record that skirted easy-listening territory and appeared to tilt precariously towards cliché, but in retrospect was an effort toward cleansing the filth of corruption from his worldview and aiming toward a Biblical purity. The attempt was valiant but incomplete; when he returned the following year with Henry’s Dream, he seemed to be casting in every direction, his lyrics full of references to crumbling souls, empty vessels, and open roads leading to no fixed destination. The dark forces regained sway with Let Love In, a song cycle that equated obsessive love with the ultimate evil (“Loverman” and “Red Right Hand” feature Satan as the main character), but also contained the brutally hilarious confessional “Thirsty Dog,” as direct and honest a lyric as Cave had dared write to that point. From then on, he seemed bent on taking his obsessions to the furthest possible extreme – the two albums that followed, Murder Ballads and The Boatman’s Call, while extremely dissimilar, are really two sides of the same plugged nickel. Death and horror have never been far from Cave’s plate, but Murder Ballads pushes the needle into the blood-red, a tragicomic spree through the badlands of narrative folk forms, a unflinching rampage through the ultimate form of human interaction. (“Crow Jane” is reprised from the first volume, while his over-the-top rewrite of “Stagger Lee,” with more “motherfuckers” per verse than any gangsta rap album, is omitted; most amusingly, the book reproduces a notebook page where Cave lists the 80 people [and one dog] who snuff it over the course of the record.) Vilified as self-parodic at the time, Murder Ballads more obviously stands out today as a necessary purgative, a casting out of his blackest impulses without which the stunningly heartfelt and pure songs of love, God, and the loss of and crisis of faith in both that make up The Boatman’s Call could not have been written. Actually, the bridge between the two (and the single best reason to purchase King Ink II) is “The Flesh Made Word,” a piece Cave wrote for broadcast on BBC Radio which is one of the finest, most eloquent things he has ever written, tracing his love of language back to Testaments Old and New, the inspiration of his father, and speaking of man as the conduit of God in ways that elude the organized religions. The piece also serves as a handy map for much of the imagery that runs through the songs that follow – “There Is A Kingdom” comes straight from a repressed passage in the Gnostic gospels, and the Christ of the New Testament, the “Man of Sorrows” whose words were both “compassionate and venomous,” is clearly echoed through much of Cave’s writing throughout. That the lyrics from The Boatman’s Call should end this book (eight more songs follow, though whether they are outtakes or the beginnings of a new project is unclear) is most appropriate – in many ways, they resolve the struggles illustrated in the words that precede them more fittingly than any biography (since evasion is as telling as honesty) and again elevate this above a mere collection of song lyrics. Where Cave will go from here is something even he likely doesn’t know, but the evidence assembled in King Ink II shines light on an artist at a most fascinating crossroads.