Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: From Her To Eternity [MUTE]

Why you'll love it

Mute's 2014 remaster was cut at Abbey Road with Mick Harvey approving the vinyl transfer, pressed on 180g vinyl. It's the record that launched the Bad Seeds, with the title track and their brooding take on "Avalanche."

This edition

• 180g vinyl
• Remastered
• Cut at Abbey Road
• Printed inner sleeve with lyrics and a short story
• Stereo mix
• Pressed in the EU

About the album

When the Birthday Party fell apart in 1983, Nick Cave and Mick Harvey didn't take long to regroup. With German guitarist Blixa Bargeld, Barry Adamson and Hugo Race, they started the band that would carry Cave through the next four decades, and this is where it begins: dark, bluesy, gothic and gloriously unhinged.

The two sides come from two sessions, side B from abandoned work at The Garden in late 1983 and side A from Trident Studios in March 1984. "Avalanche" opens the album with a slow, sepulchral reading of the Leonard Cohen song, "Cabin Fever!" rolls like a ship in a storm, "Well of Misery" is a chain-gang blues, and the title track, all hammering piano and rising dread, became a Bad Seeds staple. "Saint Huck" drags Huckleberry Finn somewhere Mark Twain never intended, and "A Box for Black Paul" closes things at a funeral pace.

The title track turned up a few years later in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, with the band playing it on screen in a Berlin club. And opening your debut with a song by Montreal's own Leonard Cohen is about as Canadian as a Bad Seeds record gets; we'll take it.

Also at Kops: more Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds on vinyl · browse Industrial & Goth

Tracklist

Listen

On Mute (cat# LPSEEDS1), a reissue of the 1984 album.