Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
No More Shall We Part (Reprise/Mute)
By Lex Marburger
You’ll never see this on MTV. Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds have a following, but it ain’t the Britney/Bizkit kind. That much said, it’s pretty obvious they won’t get much dough for a video. So they get a couplea good concepts, a room, and maybe tack on some vaguely artistic shots of them in the studio. Give ’em out as a promo video for the No More Shall We Part album/tour, and you got yrself a great gift for the maniacal Cave-head in your life (trust me, when I saw the show a while ago, there were some very “normal” looking people there. Some of your closest family members may be Bad Seed freaks). Or you could keep it for yourself.
The videos themselves aren’t really that much to shout about: “Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow” is set in a yellow-filtered bar/VFW hall, where the Seeds play to an eclectic batch of Americana (a theme Nick seems to keep coming back to, like migrating birds). The Seeds mingle and dance as well (drunkenly?), and everything finally collapses into line dancing. Yeah. I know. The second “real” video is for “As I Sat Sadly By Her Side,” a Nick-only number, standing in front of split-shot green screens, while images that essentially mime the lyrics flicker behind him. Whatever. The really interesting part is in the studio, and the interviews with him and Mick Harvey. You get to see Blixa Bargeld freak out (“THE GUITAR IS NOT IN MY HEADPHONES!”), you can see Nick in a yellow angora sweater playing with his (or someone’s, I guess) kid, and the omnipresent pontificating about music, creativity, and how Nick doesn’t hang out with many other musicians (and he listens to Beethoven). Is it a good substitute for an interview? Probably; it seems to me that Nick is a bit of a surly guy to talk to, tho’ I’d like to try someday. I do find it a bit of a relief that the songs on No More Shall We Part that sounded most suspiciously like a newfound respect for the Lord (in particular, “God Is In the House”), are, as we all supposed, merely satirical indictments of overly-smug folk blinded by the church. Whew.
