The Boatman’s Call (1997) is the Bad Seeds album with the songs about PJ Harvey — “Black Hair,” “West Country Girl” — written during and after their relationship. Cave’s most unadorned record, mostly piano and voice, the arrangements pared back to the point where the words have nowhere to hide.
Mute Records is Daniel Miller’s label, started in 1978 with his own single “Warm Leatherette” (an electronic record built around a J.G. Ballard story). Miller went on to release Depeche Mode, Yazoo, Erasure, Wire, Appliance, and eventually Cave — an extraordinary range held together by a commitment to artists operating outside commercial logic. The same label thread that runs through Wire’s The Ideal Copy and Appliance’s Imperial Metric runs through this record.
The Boatman’s Call (1997) is the Bad Seeds album with the songs about PJ Harvey — “Black Hair,” “West Country Girl” — written during and after their relationship. Cave’s most unadorned record, mostly piano and voice, the arrangements pared back to the point where the words have nowhere to hide.
Mute Records is Daniel Miller’s label, started in 1978 with his own single “Warm Leatherette” (an electronic record built around a J.G. Ballard story). Miller went on to release Depeche Mode, Yazoo, Erasure, Wire, Appliance, and eventually Cave — an extraordinary range held together by a commitment to artists operating outside commercial logic. The same label thread that runs through Wire’s The Ideal Copy and Appliance’s Imperial Metric runs through this record.