The First Born Is Dead (EU) (Remaster)

NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS、初期4枚のアルバムを初リマスタリング!
エルヴィス・プレスリーのエピソードに因んで付けられたタイトルも印象的な85年作品。この年に初の来日公演も実現。

Alternative Press - Rated #41 in AP's list of the `Top 99 Of '85-'95' - "...along with extensive liner notes and a stark retro album design, this work boasts some of [Nick Cave's] most evocative music and lyrics..." NME - 7 (out of 10) - "...all the gothic blues that endear him to those who seldom smile, but...with what non-Cave devotees refer to as `tunes'..." Pitchfork - "THE FIRST BORN IS DEAD feels like less of a genre exercise and more a distillation of the philosophy Cave would pursue for years to come.."

The blues had long been a potent undercurrent in the Birthday Party's music, so it wasn't all that surprising that Nick Cave embraced the sound and feeling of rural blues on his second album with the Bad Seeds, The Firstborn Is Dead. What was startling was how well Cave and his bandmates -- Barry Adamson, Mick Harvey, and Blixa Bargeld -- were able to absorb and honor the influences of artists like Skip James and Charley Patton while creating a sound that was unmistakably their own. The moody obsessions of rural blues -- trains, floods, imprisonment, sin, fear, and death -- seemed made to order for Cave, and he was able to tap into the doomy iconography of this music with potent emotional force; on "Tupelo," he makes a sweeping and disturbing epic of the rain-swept night when Elvis Presley was born, and "Knocking on Joe" is a tale of life on the work gang that communicates the pain of the spirit as clearly as the ache of the body. Also, the blues helped transform Cave's music as well as his lyrics; the brutal sonic pummel of the Birthday Party here gave way to a more subtle and dynamic approach that still made effective use of dissonance and bare-wired electric guitar noise while proving the balance of loud and soft only made each side deeper and more resonant. (The stark, barely there guitar and drums of "Blind Lemon Jefferson" are as startling and malignantly fascinating as anything in the Birthday Party's catalog.) The Firstborn Is Dead proved Nick Cave's musical palate was significantly broader than his debut album suggested and pointed to a path (channeling the sounds and emotions of American roots music) he would return to on many of his albums that followed. ~ Mark Deming|