Product 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.

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: #4435 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

Customer Reviews

Love Hurts
Goodness. A featherlight touch on the piano, unobtrusive backing by the Seeds, plaintive violins... is this really the same people who romped through songs like 'Loverman' and 'Stagger Lee'?
Those in the know (who know these things, you know) claim this album is the result of Cave's break-up with PJ Harvey (but you knew that). If so, the grounding of all these songs in reality certainly adds to the poignancy.
True tales or not however, this is full of richly detailed, melodic heartbreak.
Nick Cave has always written songs of remarkably high quality, but here he delivers a break-up album that stands toe-to-toe with the finest in the genre; Blood On The Tracks, Heartbreaker, Blue, No More Your Lover, Gentlemen... and The Boatman's Call.

Perfect of course
I first really got in to Nick Cave when he bought out 'The Good Son' in 89 and although I'd strutted my stuff on numerous occasions to his earlier 'Birthday Party' stuff, indeed that old chestnut 'release the bats'. However, it was Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds that really made a mark on me, and it was that experience that led me to go out and buy his previous 88 album 'Tender Prey'....and quite honestly, I've not looked back since. All Nick Cave's stuff has been largely without fault in my eyes and the 'Boatmans Call' is probably my fave, with maybe 'Let Love In' occasionally slipping in to first place, depending on where my heads at. Nothing more needs to be said really....this Album is a great journey while Nick Cave couldn't, it seems, put a foot wrong if he tried!

dark slant on the human physche
I'm not going to bore you with a sophisticated coffee table critique that actually says little and bores you to tears. But I would say that if you are in to music with a realistic edge, with a tune, but a dark slant on the human physche, then this album's a must. I think it's superb.