Track Listing

1. Into My Arms
2. Time Tree Arbour
3. People Ain't No Good
4. Brompton Oratory
5. There Is A Kingdom
6. Are You The One I've Been Waiting For
7. Where Do We Go Now But Nowhere
8. West Country Girl
9. Black Hair
10. Idiot Prayer
11. Far From Me
12. Green Eyes

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10889 in Music
• Released on: 1997-03-03
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
After a career spent tearing down the world with horror and disgust, Nick Cave finally sounds ready to start rebuilding from scratch. He has begun to find a quiet grace, and perhaps even beauty, past all the darkness that's long consumed him. Amid the ashes of a world unable to exorcise its demons, Nick actually finds love; a strange, twisted, doomed love, perhaps--but love nevertheless. On The Boatman's Call, the singer-songwriter finds room for the personal, the spiritual and even the hopeful in his grey psyche. With only the sparest accompaniment--often just a piano or organ, light percussion and violin (courtesy of Dirty Three's Warren Ellis)- -Cave employs traditional folk song structure and simplicity to weave tales saddened less through tragedy than through emptiness. Songs like "Into My Arms" and "(Are You) The One That I've Been Waiting For?" are among Cave's most self-assured and soulful to date. Stripped down and grown up--though still ghoulish and grave--Cave the storyteller has turned into something of a vampire Bruce Springsteen. Ultimately, The Boatman's Call sounds like Cave's attempt to poison his cake and eat it too. For a record so resolute in its denial of divinity, its obsession with religious themes and imagery might seem contradictory if they hadn't come from someone like Cave, who fancies himself a fallen angel searching for a ladder back to heaven. Where Gothic meets cathedral, there resides, for better or worse, our dark saint Nick. -- Roni Sarig

CD Description
Following up the almost pornographically violent MURDER BALLADS, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds switch gears and come up with an album of...you guessed it, love songs. Though known to many as the Stephen King of rock and roll, Cave has a way with lush, heartfelt ballads, and on THE BOATMAN'S CALL he gets to flex his romantic muscles. Still, with Australia's maven of morbidity at the reigns, you can bet you're not exactly venturing into Elton John territory here.
Cave's romanticism tends more toward Jacques Brel than Air Supply. THE BOATMAN'S CALL is full of sparsely-arranged, piano-based ruminations on love gone up in flames. In "Brompton Oratory" Cave observes that "No God up in the sky/No devil beneath the sea/Could do the job that you did/Of bringing me to my knees". Even in the midst of an idyllic situation, as in "People Ain't No Good", Cave can't help but bring his misanthropic tendencies to the fore. The Bad Seeds take a more subdued rolethis time around, providing subtle accompaniment to Cave's Dating Game From Hell.

Customer Reviews

Where Do We Go Now, But Nowhere?
Cave says it himself. The best love songs are the ones that deal with the more melancholic aspects of the emotion... jealousy, loss, betrayal, misery and so on. I share his viewpoint. For most, love is a painful sentiment too hard to express; even the best songwriters have at times been forced to rely on bland clichés and empty sentimental musings. Not Cave though. Here he is able to wrap his painful expressions in a number of metaphorical shrouds in order to create a more reflective experience for the listener... though, never does he feel the need to hide the more personal aspects of the songs.

The music always reflects the lyrics; so here we have Cave's signature piano style acting as the backing for his affecting baritone vocals. The bass is strong, the drumming slow, the strings distant and mournful... each of the Bad Seeds bring a unique angle to the emotional make-up of the music that creates an even more resonant listening experience. The songs are all cut from the same cloth, but the deft musicianship of the band means that each track has it's own musical signature. So we have slow, melodic piano ballads like the sorrowful and deeply religious Into My Arms; up-tempo instrumentation work like Idiot Prayer; and beautiful, but sobering string based confessionals such as Lime Tree Arbour, and my personal favourite, People Ain't No Good.

Cave's lyrics have never been better, as he leaves behind the over the top narrative ramblings of the previous album, Murder Ballads, and instead infuses his words with a sense of gutter-trash poetry and haunting religious symbolism. Many of the compositions have a painful intimacy to them akin to Dylan's seminal Blood on the Tracks, in which we can actually feel the singer emotionally opening up to the listener in the hope that that one special person may be out there paying attention. It may lack the cultural relevance of Dylan's album, though it is AS hauntingly beautiful in it's ideals. Quite simply, this is a must.

Nick Cave In Beautiful, Non-Murder Related Album Shocker!!!
To say that all of Nick Cave's albums before this point had been solely about murder is slanderous. That said death, dirt, darkness and rage have tended to be recurring themes throughout his entire career. The watermark for this was his previous album 'Murder Ballads' which examined the actions of numerous psychos in intrepid detail. It charted the victims, tried to find reason within a serial killer's head and generally exhumed all possible blood and gore it could from its limiting themes.

So where did this simply stunning album come from? Is the man getting more sensitive with age? On this evidence it would certainly seem so. The gentle piano which sparks the album to life is as big a contrast to the content of 'Murder Ballads' as one could find. In fact, 'Into My Arms' is a truly fine, almost sickly sweet love song which, were it not for Nick Cave's howl and the 'smarter than the average bear' lyrics, could belong to Burt Bacharach.

Fear not. Cave has not become a complete softie. Though he has clearly found a muse of sorts this has not stopped him from seeing the dark side of love. The title 'People Just Ain't No Good' speaks for itself. Within love there are doubts and 'The Boatman Calls', as well as celebrating the joys it can bring, bears witness to the pain of it falling apart.

Some of the tracks, are better than others. 'Brompton Oratory' and 'There Is A Kingdom' don't stand out in the same way as 'Far From Me' and 'Where Do We Go Now But Nowhere' but that is not to say that they do not merit their place. As some of the very best albums do, 'The Boatman Calls' requires you to listen to everything, providing you with an emotional odyssey rather than a set of songs.

This is an essential album to anyone who appreciates genuinely heartbreaking songwriting. If you try it, you will be rewarded. And all this from the man who 'killed' Kylie Minogue.

A Truly Remarkable Progression
When you listen to the deranged row of The Birthday Party and early Bad Seeds albums like From Her To Eternity and Tender Prey, it is hard to believe that Nick Cave even lived till 1997, let alone lived to record this deeply sombre and moving album of piano ballads. The first line is "I don't believe in an interventionist God." So obviously from the start the intense tone of this head-spinningly brilliant masterpiece is set. Lyrically the album is impossibly romantic and I could offer practically any line from any song as a quote, so wonderful are the words to these beautiful songs. As with other most writers of this ilk Cave fell prey to drink and drug abuse during his career, and in common with the fabulous love songs of other noted indulgers Tom Waits and Shane McGowan, the music is best when pondering loss and pain. Cave's voice is tone-perfect throughout and this is arguably the best singer-songwriter album of the 90's. The Bad Seeds remain unintrusive but add to every song's atmosphere in a beautifully discreet way. Every music fan should own this album, it is Cave's finest, and maybe, just maybe, he is a better lyricist than Bob Dylan.