March 19, 2001
Single Of The Week - NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS : As I Sat Sadly By Her Side
Hear'Say missed a trick here, then.
A girl with long hair and tears in her eyes. Matters of epistemological urgency. God. And a small kitten leaping playfully from lap to lap. All not quite as usual in the Magnificent World of Nick Cave, then. Admittedly, this single sees Cave walling himself into his role as rock anchorite, as much to do with the helter-skelter of modern music as a biblical concordance. His delivery is so portentous it could usher the plagues of Egypt in through your speakers and the moment where he first sings the word "kitten" with that patriarchal gloom is, unforgivably, ludicrous. Yet the tale he tells is so elegant, so breathtakingly ambitious, that he soon knocks the hilarity out of you. Over lugubrious piano and corseted drums, a woman reprimands her lover for his condemnations of the world they witness from her window, telling him that God would disapprove - "Nor does he care for you to sit at windows in judgement of the world he created/While sorrows pile up around you, ugly, useless and over-inflated". Hear'Say missed a trick here, then. It's like being locked in a small Victorian parlour and lectured by a man with voluminous sideburns, and it's by far and away this week's most thrilling record. God knows what's going on. And that's not, despite Cave's best philosophical efforts, a statement of fact.
Victoria Segal
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