Boatman's Call from ATN

Boatman's Call Review in Addicted To Noise

Obsessive personality.

Photo by Jay Blakesberg

Addicted To Noise staff writer Gil Kaufman reports: Nick Cave is nothing if not enigmatic, and unpredictable. So it just makes sense that the Australian rocker, who began his long, strange journey through death and mayhem in the early 80's with the bleak-rockers in the Birthday Party and who last year unleashed on the world the dismal Murder Ballads, would follow such a dark release with an album of plaintive, dare we say beautiful, love ballads.

Produced by Cave and the Bad Seeds and U2-collaborator Flood, The Boatman's Call (Mar. 11) is a delicate passion play built on 12 songs and love poems that reveal a more tender, but no less lyrically striking, side of Cave. Starting with the swaying "Into My Arms," one of many songs in which Cave struggles with both religion and love and the unholy intersection of the two, he pleads:

"I don't believe in an interventionist God
"But I know, darling, that you do
"But if I did I would kneel down and ask Him
"not to intervene when it came to you
"not to touch a hair on your head
"to leave you as you are,"

It is, perhaps, the purest, most sincere love song to ever drip from Cave's perennially sarcastic and morbid lips...

The album was recorded in July of 1996 in London, which is where ATN caught up with Cave this week. "I've wanted to make a record of slow, melancholic songs, for a long time now," said Cave. "I've always written a fair amount of these kinds of songs and they continue to be the favorite one's I've done."

One of the most striking things about the album, whose musical accompaniment is spare, with understated playing from the Bad Seeds and a few guest turns on violin from Warren Ellis of the Australia's Dirty Three, is how strongly the lyrics stand out, even when the music is stripped away.

Elegies like "West Country Girl" and mantra-like "Black Hair," not surprisingly, got their start as poems that Cave says he penned for a special someone. "That song was written as a gift to the person I'm singing about, it's most certainly about a particular person" said Cave of "Black Hair." "In fact, I don't know if I should have even put it on there. It's basically a song about taking a certain aspect of that woman and repeating it in a mantra-like fashion. I find that with many of the women I fall in love with, or am infatuated by, I cling to a certain physical aspects of them and am inspired by those aspects."

In the song, Cave repeats the title phrase more than a dozen times, until his entire world seems to be blotted out by a thick curtain of blackness, black hair, "as deep as ink," "black, black as the deepest sea."

Although the album is a decided turn away from the murder, rape, pillage and random violence of his last effort, Cave doesn't consider it a sign of his mellowing with age. "I have no idea if I'm mellowing out," he said with a grumble. "I mean, I think this slow, melancholic music is really a logical conclusion to what I've been doing for many years."

ATN's article on Nick is located at http://www.addict.com/html/lofi/MNOTW/display-news.cgi?97-01-27#Cave

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