Staff Reviews

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Henry's Dream (remastered)

Review by Alexander Tudor

Having de-camped to Buenos Aires, and taken on Neil Young’s producer (David Briggs), The Bad Seeds could have been succumbing to rock-star cliché, but Cave found all new inspiration in the favelas, where the local buskers played a kind of stripped down, acoustic murder ballad – improvising their lyrics over frantic, percussive, chordal guitar playing. In 1992, The Year Punk Broke™, they sounded like no-one else (as the sleevenotes point out), but they also managed to be more punk than most grunge bands, showing up the banality of the fashion-sense, the narrowness of the musical pedigree, the superficiality of the production values. »

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remastered limited cd / dvd set featuring the original album, plus a 5.1 surround sound version, seven b-sides, the videos for 'i had a dream, joe' and 'straight to you' and an installment of 'do you love me like i love you', a specially commissioned film by iain forsyth and jane pollard. 'henry's dream' is perhaps the most fully realized of all cave's albums. on it, he achieves the perfect balance between his lush, poetic sensibilities and his feral, unfettered rock 'n' roll id. most of the guitar work is acoustic, but there's no lack of momentum as the band drives harder than ever. cave's grisly cohenesque lyric talents are at their peak here. each song is like a short horror story, or a rock equivalent of rod serling's night gallery. the unrelentingly gruesome imagery of tunes like 'papa won't leave you henry' is hammered home even further by the pounding arrangements. even when things settle down, as on the folkie ballad 'loom of the land,' there's a barely veiled undercurrent of danger in the air. 'henry's dream' is full of some of cave's finest songcraft, making a case for him as the gloomy bard of '90s alt-rock.
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