Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds- Your Funeral...My Trial (1986) MP3 & FLAC

"We go down to the river where the willows weep, take a naked root for a lovers seat. "

After demonstrating their cabaret-blues acumen on the excellent covers album Kicking Against the Pricks, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds delivered their first masterpiece, Your Funeral...My Trial, a sultry, heroin-soaked nightmare of an album that clearly indicated Cave's growing talents as a songwriter. Everything that Cave would go on to explore on future albums is here in fine originary form, including murder ballads, weeping bloody-mouthed love songs, carnivalesque phantasms, and brooding spaghetti-western goth burners. The album's obvious centerpiece is "The Carny" (also featured in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire), with its swirling xylophones, bludgeoning pianos and Cave channeling both his inner backwoods preacher and arch storyteller. Some of the most stunning moments on Your Funeral...My Trial are the slower numbers, such as the exceedingly dark love song "Sad Waters" and the title track, with its stop/start rhythm and deliciously forsaken vocals. While its successor, Tender Prey, is often cited as the best Bad Seeds album of the eighties, Your Funeral...My Trial represents a gigantic leap forward artistically for the band and is perhaps Cave's most cohesive album.

Scott Walker Series, #10: Jacques Brel- Olympia 64 (1964)/ Ces Gens-Là (1966) MP3 & FLAC

"Et ils tournent et ils dansent, Comme des soleils crachés, Dans le son déchiré, D’un accordéon rance."

Still little-known to the English-speaking world, Jacques Brel's cabaret-style character portraits and his intense, emotional vocal delivery have had an incalculable influence on ground-breaking artists such as Scott Walker, David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, and Nick Cave. One of the most distinctive aspects of Brel's work is his penchant for writing songs that lovingly, bitterly, and often satirically bump shoulders with the outcasts and "losers" of this world, whom we tend to push outside our field of vision in the false belief that we are somehow different. While Brel may poke fun at his characters, singing of their impotent resentments and sodden escapades, he never looks down on them. This, coupled with his singular voice (which he is said to have worked on tirelessly), established Brel as one of the most original singer-songwriters of the post-WWII period. Scott Walker has said that it was his discovery of Brel's work that inspired his early solo career, and clearly Walker's existential tales of despair owe a huge debt of gratitude to Brel. The crowning achievement of Brel's recorded oeuvre are his two "Olympia" concerts, the second of which, Olympia 64, begins with the first and only officially released version of "Amsterdam." This is brilliant and essential stuff that is quite unlike anything else you've heard, and it has long deserved a larger English-speaking audience.

Jacques Brel- "Tango Funèbre" (1964) Live at the Huis Met De Pilaren

What's cooler than Scott Walker? Check this out. Fucking brilliant!