Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - The Good Son

UK pressing features a total of 9 tracks including 'The Good Son', 'The Weeping Song', 'Lament' & 'Lucy' and more. Mute. Album Description

High point in Nick Cave career

An often overlooked album by fans of Cave's more recent work, this album is pretty much a blueprint for many Nick Cave albums to follow. The album works well as a collective, with the two most prominent tracks 'The Weeping Song' and 'The Ship Song' going on to become Nick Cave standards which all his other ballads have been measured to. Certainly a high point in his recording career, although true commercial success was to come a few years later. A great album for any fan of Nick Cave. November 11, 2008

O Lord the songs come down...

"The Good son" opens with a song ("Foi na cruz") that's so easily forgettable that you can't quite believe that it's Nick Cave here. But then the title track rolls in and the on-stage-dark-rock-preacher Cave is back. Stormy, thundering, preaching, "The Good son" is what "The Mercy seat" was on the "Tender prey" album, and what "Tupelo" was on "The firstborn is dead": a classic, a mind bender, a face-busting, crowd-mangling hailstorm.

After that three neat, almost too neat sounding slow songs creep in: "Sorrow's child" (...sits by the river / Sorrow's child / hears not the water..."), "The ship song" (praised by many and sometimes called one of Cave's most outstanding ballads, which I definitly must deny here) and "The Hammer song", on which the mesmerising, dark voice of singer Cave is used almost to the point that it feels exploited - and you expect him on this track to explode somewhere in vein, to burst out and hammer a chorus of faul language and eye-gouging madness on us all, but in fact he never does, and in this case, it causes a possitive effect: Nick still isn't predictable or obvious. "The Hammer song" does anything but end with a crushing hammer slash.

I between these three songs there is the instant-classic sing-along piece "The weeping song", a melodramatic duet, almost a play, between Nick Cave and backing vocalist / guitar player Blixa Bargeld.

But then the extasy is over, and the album offers three more quite, introvert songs to get trough, and non of them really tend to stick.
This is often a problem with Nick Cave ballads, some of them really get to you ("Mercy" on "Tender prey", "Stranger than kindness" on "Your funeral... my trial", "Do you love me (Part 2)" on "Let love in" and about all tracks on the near perfect "No more shall we part") but a lot of them just don't stick, they do not twist and turn inside your head, they just ponder and wander on, you hear them and after they're finished, you nod and say "thank you" and then you go on with your life without having the feeling anything really happened.

This album really has too much of these "on going things" without really hurting you, which a good Nick Cave ballad does, and thank God for that, because that's really what we want from the man; to get hurt, to get hit in the right spot, straight in the heart, straight through our deceptively sane minds.

But that doesn't mean it's all blund and "just on going" - there's still the instant-classic sing-along piece, the dark mesmerising voice exploiting surprise, and the Cavian mind bender. And when these come from the dark echoing throat of The One Lord Nick Cave, you know you really get something.
July 3, 2006

One of Cave's best

If you like "No More Shall We Part" then this is for you - its in that approximate mode of Cave+Bad Seeds music.

I like this album a lot - and it has grown and grown on me over the years. Lyrics like "love came a-knockin', came a-knockin' at our door. But you, you and me dear, we don't live there anymore". Ouch. Much better as he sings it too.

I was a little worried when I first played it - there's a terrible buzz from the first strum of the guitar on the first song!!

Great album though. March 20, 2006

would give it 5 stars but it his not his best

I love Nick Cave's music, whether with the Bad Seeds or Birthday Party. Tne more I listen to him, the more I am convinced that he is one of the MAJOR figures in the history of rock. He has it all: great presence, commanding and capable voice, powerful instrumental backup, truly orignial lyrics and enough variety in his music to make you want to hear everything that he has done. The Good Son's boasts a number of piano-driven pieces that make this CD from the others, but the songs do not rank up there with his greats. Nevertheless, do not hesitate to get this CD if you like Nick Cave. He is a giant and I cannot wait for his new CD Nocturama to come out. December 24, 2002

Another Fine Effort

I haven't heard Nick Cave's earliest albums yet, so I can't comment on how The Good Son stacks up against those, but I can say that it compares well with his subsequent masterpieces of the 1990s.
The CD starts with a quasi-religious, almost hymn-like song, in Portuguese no less. I liked it from the start as I do the title cut, the epic style of which rather defines Nick Cave for me.
In the Hammer Song, Mick Harvey's guitar work gives it the feel of a theme of a Western movie as the vocals outline the plot.
Next to the Hammer Song, my favorite is the Weeping Song, with its unusual cadence and call/response vocals.
The funniest cut is the Witness Song which takes a perhaps inadvertent crack at faith healing and the power of suggestion.
There is not one badly written song on the album, though obviously I have my favorites. The Good Son is another fine effort from Nick Cave and serves to bolster his reputation not only as a musician, but as a songwriter whose command of language sets him far apart from most of his contemporaries. April 28, 2002

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