Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - From Her To Eternity LP

The fact that Nick Cave opened his new outfit's first album with a cover of a Leonard Cohen song, the delusional visionary brooding of "Avalanche," was a sign that he had moved in for good to what Cohen would later call ‘the tower of song'. Cohen's original had appeared on Songs of Love and Hate, an album whose title sounds like a manifesto for Cave's solo career. The narrative art that Cave had begun to master in the later days of The Birthday Party flourishes on 1984's From Her To Eternity, in the sick humor of "Wings Off Flies" (in which a lovesick protagonist plays ‘she loves me, she loves me not' with an unfortunate insect), and "A Box For Black Paul" (an examination of whose demise could possibly be interpreted as a funeral inquest for The Birthday Party), and the cautionary Mississippi tale of "Saint Huck" who ‘trades in the mighty Old Man River/ For the Dirty Old Man Latrine'. Cave had first explored an American South of the imagination in "Swampland"; but if some lyrics showed