Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: Nick Cave (vocals); Mick Harvey, Blixa Bargeld (guitar); Conway Savage (keyboards); Martyn P. Casey (bass); Thomas Wydler (drums); Jim Sclavunos (percussion).
Additional personnel: PJ Harvey, Kylie Minogue, Shane MacGowan (vocals); Anita Lane, Brian Hooper, Warren Ellis.
Producers: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Tony Cohen, Victor Van Vugt.
Recorded at Wessex Studios, London, England; Atlantis, Sing Sing and Metropolis Studios, Melbourne, England between 1993 and 1995.
Personnel: Nick Cave (vocals, guitar, piano, organ, sound effects); Blixa Bargeld (vocals, guitar, sound effects); Warren Ellis (vocals, violin, accordion); Thomas Wydler (vocals, trombone, drums, maracas, tambourine); Conway Savage (vocals, piano, organ, background vocals); Martyn Casey (vocals, bass guitar); Anita Lane (vocals, sound effects); Clare Moore, Dave Graney, Liz Corcoran, Astrid Munday, Spencer P. Jones, Geri Johnson, Brian Hooper, James Johnston, Mariella del Conte, Kylie Minogue, PJ Harvey, Rowland Howard, Shane MacGowan, Katharine Blake (vocals); Mick Harvey (guitar, acoustic guitar, organ, bass guitar, drums, percussion, background vocals); Hugo Race (guitar); Jenny Anderson, Sue Simpson, Jen Anderson (violin); Kerran Coulter (viola); Helen Mountfort (cello); Terry Edwards (horns); Jim Sclavunos (drums, tambourine, percussion, bells).
Audio Mixer: Gregg Jackman.
Recording information: Atlantis, Melbourne, Australia (1993-1995); Metropolis Studios, Melbourne, Australia (1993-1995); Sing Sing Recording Studios, Melbourne, Australia (1993-1995); Wessex Studios, London, England (1993-1995).
Unknown Contributor Roles: Mick Harvey; Nick Cave; Anita Lane.
Arrangers: Mick Harvey; Nick Cave.
In some ways, Murder Ballads is the record Nick Cave was waiting to make for his entire career. Death and violence have always haunted his music, even when he wasn't explicitly singing about the subject. On Murder Ballads, he sings about nothing but death in the most gruesome, shocking fashion. Divided between originals and covers, the record is awash in both morbid humor and sobering horror, as the Bad Seeds provide an appropriate backdrop for the carnage, alternating between blues, country, and lounge-jazz. Opening the affair is "Song for Joy," a tale from a father who has witnessed his family's death at the hands of serial killer. It is the most disturbing number on the record, lacking any of the gallows humor that balances out the other songs. Cave's duets with Kylie Minogue ("Where the Wild Roses Grow") and PJ Harvey ("Henry Lee") are intriguing, but the true tours de force of the album are "Stagger Lee" and "O'Malley's Bar." Working from an obscure, vulgar variation on "Stagger Lee," Cave increases the sordidness of the song, making Stagger an utterly irredeemable character. The original "O'Malley's Bar" is even stronger, as he spins a bizarrely funny epic of one man's slaughter of an entire bar. During "O'Malley's Bar," Cave and the Bad Seeds are at the height of their powers and the performances rank among the best they have ever recorded. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine
In his trademark bottomless voice, Nick Cave narrates one tragic, violent tale after another. In excruciating detail, he examines the fine apects of murder, varying viewpoints between victims and killers, and investigating the dialogue between them from many angles. MURDER BALLADS, his ninth release with the Bad Seeds, is Cave at his most raw and lyrical.
He delves unflinchingly into macabre territory with the backing of his band's spare, moaning, reverb-rich playing--by turns sweetly tuneful and disjointedly dirge-like. PJ Harvey assumes the role of a woman scorned on "Henry Lee," in which she describes stabbing to death the man who rejects her. Her story is interspersed with choruses of, "La la la la la/La la la la lee/A little bird lit down on Henry Lee," adding a sense of perverse humor to the ballad's bleakness. On "Where the Wild Roses Grow," a man kills his lover, explaining that "all beauty must die," and Kylie Minogue provides the innocent, breathy voice of the dead lover with a ghostly, haunting softness. Yet amid the troubling, startling brutality runs a sense of fragility and a poetic lyricism that makes these songs linger. minimize