The Birthday Party- Hee-Haw (1988) MP3 & FLAC -For Pieter-

"I put on my coat of trumpets. Will she be there? Is my piccolo on straight?"

Hee-Haw virtually defines the term "transitional," as it pairs the earliest releases by The Birthday Party with some of the final recordings Cave & co. made as The Boys Next Door. Five of these latter songs originally comprised The Boys Next Door's final release: the Hee-Haw EP, which, with its jagged rhythms and strangled melodies, has far more in common with the exceedingly dark aesthetic of The Birthday Party than with the band's earlier work on Door, Door. While The Birthday Party's initial recordings show a new-found abandon both in terms of instrumentation and Nick Cave's vocals, several songs such as "Happy Birthday" and "Waving My Arms" only occasionally wed this new approach to a memorable melody; however, there are some gems to be found on this compilation, such as "The Friend Catcher," which bear a much closer resemblance to the legendary trashcan Goth meets Appalachia sound that the band would perfect over the course of the next few years. In theory, this "odds and sods" collection shouldn't work as well as it does, but it provides an invaluable glance into the band's transformation after leaving Australia for greener commercial and artistic pastures in London.

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.

The Boys Next Door- Door, Door (1979) MP3 & FLAC

"I've been contemplating suicide, but it really doesn't suit my style."

In a time before murder ballads, mercy seats and birthday parties, a young, Australian middle-class malcontent named Nick Cave fronted a band called The Boys Next Door. Cave and his mates Mick Harvey, Tracy Pew, Phil Calvert, and later, Rowland S. Howard, spent their nights chasing a musical vision forged out of the British glam scene of the early seventies, the burgeoning Melbourne punk scene of the late seventies, and the darkest corners of the American country-folk and blues traditions. While the band's only album, the obscurely titled Door, Door, tends to get lost in the considerable shadow of what came next (the band's transformation into Goth legends The Birthday Party), it is actually a quite enjoyable slice of glammy Post-Punk pop that happens to contain a moment of transcendence: Rowland S. Howard's "Shivers." Musically, the song sounds as if pulled straight from the Ziggy Stardust songbook, but Cave's vocals, adopting the croon that would become the trademark of his early nineties solo work, lends the song a darker, slightly unhinged quality that gives Howard's fine lyrics even more of an air of authenticity. While the rest of the album pales in comparison, there are still some nice Post-Punk gems to be found, including "The Voice" and "Somebody's Watching."  Though certainly not as consistently memorable as The Birthday Party and Cave's solo work, Door, Door is still well worth a listen.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds- "Tupelo" Video (1985)

Speaking of Nick...

The Boys Next Door- "Shivers" (1979) Live

Amazing song by an amazing musician: Rowland S. Howard (R.I.P.). Oh, and a young Nick Cave singing it doesn't hurt either :)

The Birthday Party- Mutiny EP/The Bad Seed EP (1983) MP3 & FLAC

"Deep in the woods, a funeral is swinging."

This collection, comprised of two EPs released in 1983 by The Birthday Party on the eve of their acrimonious, drug-fueled dissolution, begins unforgettably with Nick Cave's backwoods-preacher exhortation, "Hands up! Who wants to die!?!," and only gets more apocalyptic from there. While offering, once again, their sleazy Post-Punk take on the Country-Blues mixed with a liberal dose of The Stooges, The Birthday Party's swan-song bears some marks of a transitional work. For example, while Cave's vocals still exude his familiar over-the-top morbidity, there seems to be a greater quotient of seriousness on these EPs, which contrasts with earlier recordings, where Cave, Rowland & co. often served up their blood-soaked sermons with a subtle wink of the eye. This and the more polished production cause songs such as "Deep in the Woods" and "Sonny's Burning" to sound like something of a blueprint for Cave's next venture, The Bad Seeds, a name nicked, incidentally, from the title of one of these EPs. In fact, many of these songs sound like an early precursor to Murder Ballads, which, come to think of it, isn't a bad thing at all.