Nick Cave is a big weirdo. A dapper, crooning weirdo, perhaps, but a weirdo, nonetheless. Thankfully, he's as multitalented and charming as he is weird, which makes experiments like And the Ass Saw the Angel, a collection of readings from and music for Cave's novel of the same name, worth checking out.
The album is a collaboration between Cave and his Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds band mates Mick Harvey and Ed Clayton-Jones. If you aren't familiar with Cave's or Harvey's musical work, And the Ass Saw the Angel will serve as a poor introduction. The album contains none of their characteristic Johnny Cash-esque balladry or gothic loungery. It's more like an avant garde book on tape, with Cave dramatizing portions of his deranged, compelling and thoroughly twisted novel over dark, atmospheric music by Harvey and Clayton-Jones. After four short readings of various segments of the novel, Cave's contributions fade away, leaving the listener to be swallowed by Harvey's and Clayton-Jones's atonal gloom. Think David Lynch without any of the suburban sugarcoating.
Cave's four readings only sketch out the novel's characters and plot. "Lamentation" gives us a first-person description of the novel's antihero, Euchrid Crowe, the mute son of a drunken mother and a detached, unbalanced father, who endures the abuse of both his family and his own collapsing mind. "Muh Sanctum" reveals an outdoor retreat that shields Euchrid from his cruel world. "One Autumn" details Euchrid's ritualistic burial of a dead mule. "Animal Static" supplies more setting. Taken out of the novel's context, Cave's words become generally meaningless, more poetic than prosaic. The text is less interesting than the treatment Cave, Harvey and Clayton-Jones give them. Cave layers his voice with different vocal effects, making it reverberate and double creepily to reflect the dementia of his character. Harvey and Clayton-Jones supply the tracks with an ominous, discordant soundtrack that underscores and furthers the menace and instability of Cave's characterization. This is heady, spooky stuff, the perfect soundtrack to Cave's novel.
None of the material on this album is exactly new. The four vocal tracks originally comprised a bonus EP that accompanied the Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album Tender Prey in 1988, the same year Cave's novel hit shelves. Music composed by Harvey and Clayton-Jones for a 1993 Australian theatrical interpretation of the book comprises the remaining 12 tracks on the album. Prior to the release of this album, none of the musical tracks have appeared anywhere but in theatrical performance, making this a must-have for Seeds completists and Harvey fans (of which there are a few, given his solo work and high-profile collaborations with PJ Harvey and others). The album is also indispensable as a primer to Cave's novel, a modern Gothic masterpiece that earned him comparisons to author Gabriel Garcia Marquez. And the Ass Saw the Angel is bizarre -- a fitting introduction to Cave's prose and voice and his novel's peculiar mood.
Sean Flinn | February 1, 2000
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