31. Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!

31. Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (Mute UK 2008, Anti- US 2008)

This is a placeholder for an entry to come in my Top 125 Albums of the 2000s, which I selected at the end of 2009. This blog has been dormant since autumn 2010, and my intention is to finish the final 45 entries as originally selected despite the distant vantage point and my opinions having changed in the interim. 

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63. Bright Yellow Bright Orange

63. Bright Yellow Bright Orange, The Go-Betweens (Jetset, 2003)

Brisbane songwriters Robert Forster and Grant McLennan produced six studio albums from 1978-88 with their co-ed group the Go-Betweens, earning wide critical acclaim and an adoring fan base in Australia and the UK.  The group possessed a sparkling, jangling pop sound; more notable, though, was the two leaders’ songwriting and its uncanny ability to depict the mundane and invigorating aspects of romance, friendship, and everyday life and retain a masculine perspective without avoiding sensitive or feminine qualities.  The continual lack of commercial success proving frustrating, the band parted ways in ’89 and its two leaders went on to separate careers while remaining close friends.  Both delivered a handful of strong solo records in the ’90s.  They occasionally performed their group’s songs together as a duo, until deciding to fully revive the brand with a new Go-Betweens album in 2000.  For that effort, The Friends of Rachel Worth, Forster and McLennan created a new roster including Sydney bassist Adele Pickvance (with whom they had both worked) and, on drums, Janet Weiss of US indie group Sleater-Kinney (the other members of Sleater-Kinney guested, as did Sam Coombes from Weiss’s side project Quasi).  The album was a striking return to form and on par with their best work, revealing the Aughts-model Go-Betweens to be a vibrant concern.

Bright Yellow Bright Orange is the second of three Aughts Go-Betweens LPs, and the eighth overall.  The Sleater-Kinney contingent no longer present, Forster and McLennan are accompanied here by Pickvance and drummer Glenn Thompson (who played on Forster’s ’93 solo LP Calling From a Country Phone).  The songs have a less explicitly acoustic feel than those of its predecessor, though the albums do feel of one piece.  Bright Yellow opens with a pair of crisp rockers; Forster’s Caroline and I imagines the parallels between two unrelated people with the same birth year, in this case himself and Princess Caroline of Monaco (“It gave me something small I could feel/That maybe as you grew you knew how I’d feel”).  McLennan’s Poison in the Walls follows, and could almost be interpreted as an oblique nod to the Go-Betweens’ prior run (“There’s nothing more that’s new/And where’s that brilliant juice/The flame that fired your heart/That made you want to start.”)  In Her Diary recalls Forster’s previous quotidian character examinations like The Clarke Sisters (’87); the subject’s diligent record-keeping leaves her disconnected from her own memories, with nothing other than “Some kind of thing/That reminds her of a photograph/Of some people she’s known.”  In Mrs. Morgan, McLennan reprises a character from the song Trapeze Boy on his ’91 Jack Frost LP (a collaboration with Steve Kilbey of the Church).  Bright Yellow closes with two sparse ballads, first Forster's Something for Myself; “Trapped within an image/Unable to move,” its protagonist vows to “get a new strength” and move beyond his own hangups.  McLennan’s Unfinished Business closes the album with a tender, quiet gesture to an exhausted friend: “Are you gonna make it?”  Like all Go-Betweens albums, Bright Yellow Bright Orange is just a simple collection of outstanding yet unassuming rock-influenced pop songwriting; Forster and McLennan’s ability to produce such winning material nearly thirty years after their first single—while sounding as fresh as their younger contemporaries—illustrates their standing as one of the great songwriting teams of the Aughts.

Highlights: Caroline and I, Poison in the Walls, Old Mexico, Something for Myself

Sublime bit: Old Mexico’s choruses: “You were so excited/But you weren’t invited,” with shimmering acoustic guitar and Pickvance harmonies.

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100. Nocturama

100. Nocturama, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (Anti-/Mute, 2003)

After the ’96 throat-clearing of the grimly themed Murder Ballads, Nick Cave produced two successive albums of somber, mournful songs departing steeply from the frenetic rock arrangements enlivening his earlier work with the Bad Seeds and the sonic terrorism of his previous group the Birthday Party. Cave famously opens ’97’s The Boatman’s Call by intoning “I don’t believe in an interventionist God,” and its ’01 follow-up No More Shall We Part is only marginally more dynamic than Boatman’s melancholy explorations. The albums provide some of the most beautiful songs in Cave’s catalog; but, they are lengthy and proceed at a funereal pace and make for draining listening experiences.

On his twelfth studio LP with the Bad Seeds, Cave adjusted the formula. Nocturama retains the slow, earnest piano ballads but juxtaposes them with raucous, full-tilt rock numbers. This can be jarring, especially if not listening on vinyl; it is an unusual Aughts album in that its sequencing seems to have considered the side breaks of a phonograph record. Side one begins with three pieces reminiscent of No More Shall We Part. He Wants You is an aching account of a man who “is straight and he is true”; making it more aching is the benighted male certainty that his love alone is enough to sustain it for two. Right Out of Your Hand contains some of the album’s most vivid imagery (“airborne starlings circle/over the frozen fields”) and a protagonist as misguided as his predecessor; “Give a sucker an even break/he’ll lose it all every time,” Cave sings, before admitting that “you’ve got me eating/right out of your hand.” Bring It On follows, a duet with Chris Bailey of fellow Australian punk veterans the Saints that blossoms slowly into an impassioned arrangement unlike any that Cave attempted since the mid-’90s. Like much of Nocturama, it is emboldened by the fiery violin work of Warren Ellis. Even after flipping the record, side two’s opening cut Dead Man in My Bed is like a finger in a socket after the gentle evolution of side one. Its frantic, clattering sound sits awkwardly before the rest of side two, which is a mirror image of side one and whose highlight is another ballad of romantic loyalty, Rock of Gibraltar. The original double vinyl had a blank fourth side; side three is consumed by the 15-minute Babe, I’m on Fire, a breathless, demented rant echoing the fever pitch of Dead Man in My Bed yet three times as long. Boasting an outrageous 38 verses, it is a litany of bizarre characters from “the backyard abortionist” to “my mate Bill Gates,” all of whom exist only to concur with Cave’s crazed testimony of “babe, I’m on fire.” It is a novelty whose relegation to the vinyl’s side three makes it a de facto bonus track, but it is an exhilarating novelty that foreshadows the frenzied tone of Cave’s later Aughts work with the Bad Seeds and his side project Grinderman. Nocturama’s schizophrenic nature raised some hackles among Cave fans (perhaps including longtime Bad Seed guitarist Blixa Bargeld, who resigned after recording) and while it does scan less evenly than its two predecessors it is a more enjoyable listen.
 
Highlights: Right Out of Your Hand, He Wants You, Rock of Gibraltar, Bring It On
 
Sublime bit: 3:30-4:15 of Right Out of Your Hand, as Cave’s voice entwines with the Bad Seeds’ backing harmonies, his voice pitching up at 4:09.

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