THE UNHEARD MUSIC : DARK STORIES FROM CAVE

When he was a member of the Birthday Party, a band of Australian mutineers responsible for some of the most savage punk rock ever committed to wax, Nick Cave played the wayward child of the most perverse elements of American culture. High on a vision of Elvis engorged with doughnuts and staggering around a Vegas stage for his last hurrah, Cave was the very embodiment of wretched excess.

Creating a body of material steeped in the storytelling tradition of American roots music, the singer-writer populated his songs with crazed Southerners delirious with religious fervor, and performed them with the murderous rage that pulses through much Delta blues.

Since the six-year Birthday Party ended 1983, Cave has proved himself a prolific musician, releasing two albums of original songs, one of outside material and two EPs.

Cave’s persona has taken on added depth as well.

Cave spent the past two years writing his first novel, “And the Ass Looked at the Angel” (to be published this year by Black Spring Press), and that experience resulted in a new mask in his carpetbag of disguises. While at work on the book, Cave found it to impossible to write lyrics, so he decided to record an album of songs by some his favorite American tunesmiths.

“Kicking Against the Pricks” (on Homestead Records) reveals Cave’s remarkable feel for the darker threads of the American myth. Including stunningly inventive interpretations of songs by Johnny Rivers, the Band, John Lee Hooker, Johnny Cash and Jimmy Webb, among others, “Kicking” finds Cave striking a pose evocative of Bryan Ferry in his “These Foolish Things” period.

Coming on like a dissipated lounge singer burdened with a heart too weary to be sad, Cave seems to whisper, “Take these faded souvenirs, I can’t use them anymore.” Shamelessly reveling in maudlin emotion, he performs with such weepy solemnity that he seems to be parodying the song-stylist bag even as he embraces it--but therein lies the trick. Cave carries sentimentality to such an extreme that it sheds all vestiges of sweetness and begins to roar. The coin flips and we find ourselves embroiled in episodes of passion carried to murderous degrees.

Most of Cave’s songs are about leaving or losing a lover, and he’s big on songs about guys who kill their girlfriends. “Hey Joe” is an obvious choice for Cave, and he converts that moth-eaten rocker into a terrifying tale of the wages of betrayal. Even better is his rendition of an old Cash chestnut called “The Folksinger.” The bitter reflections of a dissolute minstrel whose glory days are long past, the song is so perfectly tailored to Cave that he might have written it if Cash hadn’t done the job for him.

Backed by the Bad Seeds, which includes former members of Magazine, the Birthday Party and Einsturzende Neubauten, Cave orchestrates music that sounds as if it were scrupulously plotted out note by note. Powerful though the Bad Seeds is, there’s nothing remotely spontaneous about the group’s music, which is as premeditated and polished as a Shakespearean soliloquy.

Cave, too, eschews any trace of improvisation in his stage manner, and doesn’t so much sing a tune as perform an autopsy on it. Cutting into the flesh of the song and peeling back its skin to expose the bleeding heart that makes it live, Cave eyes songs with a mixture of love and contempt, circling them suspiciously, occasionally nudging the body with the toe of his boot.

Cave’s latest release, the four-song EP “Your Funeral, My Trial,” offers ample proof of his growing powers as a writer. As in country music, story line is of central importance, and “Your Funeral” features one of the most compelling stories of the Cave canon. The strange tale of the disappearance of a circus hand who leaves nothing behind but a starving horse that’s subsequently shot by the circus master, “The Carny” is a requiem for those cursed by nature, people oddly endowed or over-endowed in body, heart, or mind. Recounting the story against a backdrop of woozy calliope music, Cave conveys a palpable sense of suffocatingly moist air, of the smell of the place where this sad story unfolds.

Cave hasn’t attracted much of a following, probably because the mass audience has a rather narrow idea of what a pop song should be. Most people think of a “story song” as something along the lines of “Papa Don’t Preach.” Cave, however, works on a much broader canvas, and he’s essentially a man without an audience. The reluctant messiah for the wraithlike adherents of gloom rock, Cave has no means of reaching those people--those with an interest in literature--apt to appreciate the subtleties of his work.

Most pop fans who encounter Cave’s music dismiss it as laughably grim. In regards to that, Allen Ginsberg once commented that at a certain point in human experience joy and suffering become indistinguishable from one another, and that to truly revel in the beauty of life is to simultaneously grieve for its inevitable passing. Listen to Cave with that in mind and his music becomes a glorious affirmation of life.