THE PAPER CHASE AND XIU XIU – cover Nick Cave

(7”, stickfigure)

A daring joke with a hilarious seriousness about it, just the way a good cover version should be. Especially when it is Nick Cave, due to his multilayered and deeply complex and enormously grown canon of work, and also because there are only a few artists as admired by me as Nick Cave, which makes the effort a tricky one to please me. (The last decent Cave cover I heard of course was the one by Johnny Cash – a whole different story altogether.) On the other hand, I grapped this one when I saw it because I knew I couldn’t do wrong. Moreover, I am all in for a good laugh when I see one. Unfortunately most people are completely inable to produce a good joke and stay within the lines of good (musical) taste and produce something worthwhile.

If there is any kind of special story behind this release, then I haven’t heard it yet, but that is not so surprising, I usually get to know things last. That has the advantage of not having to run with the others competing for the first place (which I would never get to anyway, not even close). So I can tell what it is I see, rather than what I think I should be seeing while I concentrate on what I should be seeing next.

Xiu Xiu reduce “Jack The Ripper” to what it could be, a trashing bass monster. Which is for one an interesting and gripping alternative wording to the original, and on the other hand a fascinating move by Xiu Xiu in regard to their other work. I once broke two guitar strings at once while playing this song on my acoustic guitar and it still is one of the most basic, heavy blues / gospel trashers by Cave and The Bad Seeds, that stays well inside the acoustic realm. If I think of all those crappy rock-bands that do their “unplugged” sessions now, unable to produce either the volume and power of their amplified shows or a worthwhile and interesting version of their music, because all they can come up with is the same song in the same arrangement only played with acoustic guitars, and compare it to the onslaught of power that The Bad Seeds are able to create, especially live, I wonder if there should be a law against crappy rockbands. For a two piece to give this song the necessary edge, they have to turn up the distortion and effects pedals to get it going. That’s what Xiu Xiu do in a very consequential manner, drowning out the vocals almost completely and pushing the melody so far into the back it is hardly recognizeable.

On the other side of this little platter The Paper Chase have chosen one of the more disputed titles in the Cave canon to work on. Is “God is in the house” an ironic statement about white suburban bigotry caped in religion, "a deeply cynical reckoning with suburban christianity"? Or is it Cave getting to grips with the ugly side of a modern religion praying to the god he so depserately tries to pin down? Either way, the song also has some slyly irritating parts in them, but what the Paper Chase do is great, to say the least. In all those parts, where Cave goes really silent and plucks the piano most gently, they rather opt to bang the drums in the best Todd Trainer-way only to crunch in with the weirdly distorted electric guitars in the right moment. Makes me wonder why I never praised their latest album “God bless your black heart” on these pages. Listening back to it, I can see all the lines and connections to this song and Nick Cave open up.

Very much all against what the cover of this record suggests, this is not at all a joke. It is some of a joke, but as Niels Bohr once said: “take the light things serious, and the serious things lightly” (or something like that, anyway), so the best way to grapple a reworking of an artist as great as Nick Cave, is using a big portion of humour without losing the due respect.