Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds- Let Love In
There are two consistent themes on this album: “letting love in” (surprise, surprise), and things going “jingle jangle.” Bells tolling is all over this album, both in the lyrics of the opening song and literally sounding on almost every track on the album. And the reason is not apparent.
The tolling bells makes a reference to the practice of tolling bells whenever someone dies, but also whenever there’s a wedding, so we have a connection of letting love in, and also death. Letting love in, in case you can’t tell, is not treated as a good thing. On the track “I Let Love In” Cave warns against it saying: “ Far worse to be love’s lover/ Than the lover love has scorned,” which, translated into the positive means, “Better to have loved and lost than to have fallen in love with the idea of love only to have harsh reality shatter your misconceptions.”
To Nick Cave, love is a redeemer of sins, or perhaps just an attempt for one person to redeem their sins using another. This obviously leads to complications because that kind of guilt is self inflicted, and expecting some other person to take responsibility of that guilt is ridiculous and unrealistic. And yet it is a pattern that some people fall into, including Cave himself.
So love to Nick Cave is not a pure thing, it is tainted by “Despair and Deception/ Love’s ugly little twin sisters.” And yet there are no specific images, with a few exceptions, to justify that claim. The one exception that springs to mind is “Thirsty Dog” a rollicking track about a drunk “feeling sorry for himself in The Thirsty Dog.” It’s only a few bagpipes away from being a Dropkick Murphy’s song and I like it quite a bit. Anyways, the song consists of the narrator listing things he’s sorry for including “I’m sorry about the hospital/ Some things are unforgivable.” He’s put his lover in the hospital before, but he’s sorry and he wants her back. That’s what happens when you “let love in.”
3/5 I get the impression that Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds are better appreciated through their songs than their albums. With that in mind check out “Thirsty Dog,” and the hit off this album “Red Right Hand,” a song which takes itself so seriously it borders into parody. If you like Leonard Cohen, check out “I Let Love In” and “Nobody’s Baby Now.” Cave and Cohen have a lot in common in that they’re both great lyricists who can’t really sing. Also check out at least one live performance. Nick Cave is a magnetic performer, something like a vampire evangelical preacher.