I'm actually
very sympathetic to what you're saying, and the flippant answer is that he kicked heroin. Anyway, I am sympathetic to the critique you're offering - extremely so, in fact. I disagree about the merits of
Murder Ballads, and I do think
The Boatman's Call is almost perfect.
That being said, every record between
The Boatman's Call and
Push the Sky Away has bored me to death. My guess is that part of that stems from the fact that he stopped writing with Blixa, and hadn't really yet started writing with Warren Ellis. I think it took him (them?) a while to find a post-Blixa voice. He was more important than people realized (I think the last 15 years of Neubauten have confirmed this).
All of that being said, I think you are right - there's a point where he stopped "vomiting" from the depths of his soul, and started being a songwriter in a more literary sense. It is something that is probably very good for him, but not so good for us. There's a point where he becomes a "muso" as you put it. That's good for him (his life is no longer a drug-fueled shambles), but it is not necessarily good for his art. I view the (in my opinion, at least) thoroughly mediocre albums between
The Boatman's Call and
Push the Sky Away as the period in which he is, essentially, learning to be an artist again.
Wow, this sounds pretentious. Sorry.
XidiouX wrote:> Nick Cave about a week later (first time I’ve seen him since the 1990’s)
Last time I saw Nick Cave was in the same decade, I think around the time of Let Love In. Since that album I've lost interest in him to the extent that I can count on the fingers of one hand (and in some cases one fifth of one hand) the number of times I've listened to each of his subsequent albums. Continuing the theme, it's hard to put my finger on why.
I think it's probably because he became too serious and too 'muso'-like. There was a deranged, exceptional and dangerous, raw adventuring genius in his earlier work that went to every emotional extreme: from the infinite tragic sadness of A Box For Black Paul to the ravenous sexual hunger of From Her To Eternity through the black-hearted Trainspotting of Tender Prey before consumer-friendly Trainspotting to the whole Goodfellas on bad acid romp in the heart of America that was Henry's Dream (IMO his masterpiece.)
What a journey he took us on! But I just don't get a feeling of a continuation of that from anything he's done since, say, Nocturama. Even Murder Ballads arguably sounds too clean for the subject matter- compare with The Reptile House E.P. The production values have obviously gone way up but possibly to the detriment of the immediacy and grab-you-by-the-collar quality of the songs themselves, if they even have any of the key qualities of his earlier songwriting these days. From the admittedly limited time I've given them, I don't really have much to say. For the most part I've just found them boring, with the only exception that springs to mind being the first track on Skeleton Key, for obvious reasons.