Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - The Videos

Rating:
Summary: Cave -- the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Review: At the beginning of the dvd, Cave admits that he and the band do not like doing videos. And this shows, but with wacky mixed results. On the high (in a down and dirty way) end, "Stagger Lee," which is the opening video, is funny, profane, and tongue in cheek. It also rocks. "Into My Arms," is spare and beautiful, its black and whites stark as if filmed by Bergman. On the lush end, with first class production values, is "Where the Wild Roses Grow," a beautiful and disturbing duet acted out on the river bank with singer Kylie Minogue (and an ever present snake). Cave's voice is a remarkably strong instrument -especially when it comes to dark stuff.

After that, there seems to be a large middle ground, with a number of videos admittedly done on the fly. Particularly good is "Henry Lee,"a one take effort by Cave and P.J. Harvey. She's got a terrific voice, and obviously these two were hot for each other at one time. It also helps that the song is a good one. Another duet, with Pogue front man, Shane McGowan, is kind of sad. Cave is in great voice, but McGowan is a burned out case, and it shows. "The Weeping Song" is bizarre and cheap with its choppy plastic water and Zorba dancing, but also fun. "Mercy Seat" is a surprising failure. You'll like the version done on "God is in the House" much better (as is the case with a number of the songs shown on both dvds). At the absolute bottom is "In the Ghetto," which has to be one of the worst videos ever made. The camera slips in out of focus, and Cave admits that at that time in his career, it was a mistake to send him the money for such efforts, since he usually would spend it on "other things." (He must of gave some of those "other things" to the guy with the camera.) Amusingly, the band tells you its own take before most of the videos on the dvd, and they are often their own harshest critics. Actually, the best, most polished videos I've seen by the band, appear on "God is in the House," (which appear apart from the concert). I'm still glad I got this, but its interesting to see how the Bad Seeds have evolved - and it has been for the better. Right now they are clearly one of the best bands out there.

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic
Review: I have been a fan of Nick Cave since he was with The Birthday Party but had never seen him perform and had never seen any music videos. This is a real treat for fans and a good intro for the uninitiated. It's also very fairly priced for all the entertainment you get out of it.

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic
Review: I have been a fan of Nick Cave since he was with The Birthday Party but had never seen him perform and had never seen any music videos. This is a real treat for fans and a good intro for the uninitiated. It's also very fairly priced for all the entertainment you get out of it.

Rating:
Summary: A Mixed Bag...
Review: I love Nick Cave and his musical stylings and these videos are the best way to experience it beyond watching them live. Some of the videos here are better than others. Stagger Lee is great, campy fun, Red Right Hand is ominous and strangely creepy, while Henry Lee finds Cave and his former lover PJ Harvey giving themselves up to a one-take of visible passion and tension. Loverman (later covered by Metallica), is a loud hypnotic ride (literally) as the band gets filmed being put into a trance by a professional hypnotist.

Other stand out videos include the behind the scenes road trip piece, Wanted Man, the live, I Had A Dream Joe and the beginning of the Mercy Seat shot in stark black and white. The rest are underbudgeted yet still worthy of a look.

Rating:
Summary: Pretty crappy for such a great artist.
Review: I really enjoy Nick Cave's music and I have almost all of his CDs. He has a deep and poetic lyrical style that is rare in popular music today. So when I saw his DVD of music videos, I was intrigued. Man was I let down. Maybe two or three of the videos are tolerable, most are bad and a few are outright terrible. I am pretty forgiving to low budget productions in most cases. Usually I can get passed the cheap sets and poor camera work on videos, if they are creative. But something about these videos' cheap production was just plain bad. If you like Nick Cave, stick to his audio collection and just pretend you never saw this DVD.

Rating:
Summary: Finally Cave's video's on DVD....almost all of them
Review: Not much to say about this release. Fans of Cave have long been living off decaying VHS copies that they had either taped The Bad Seeds vids onto, or from the old original release. Thank goodness we now have them on DVD, including some extremely hard to find ones. What's cool is that nearly every video is introduced by a snippet sound byte from the band. The down side is only Nick (and sometimes guitarist Blixa) discuss the songs and videos, but their kept extremely short. About one or two sentences regarding the shooting of the video's, then they show them. Also, the majority of the introductions are basically variations on how much they disliked shooting video's.

The only other complaint I have is that video's from the two last albums are not present. Of course, 'No More Shall we Part's promo's can be seen on the 'God Is In The House' concert disc, so that's not a big loss. However, it would have been nice if they had included the vid for 'Bring it On', which has never had an official DVD presentation.

Still, they are the video's, and their finally on DVD. That alone warrants this DVD a 4 star rating.

Rating:
Summary: Intriguing...
Review: Well, what can be said that hasn't been mentioned in the other reviews? Pretty much nothing...

The photo quality of the videos is very grainy, mostly due to the fact that they were all mostly filmed on low-tech gear (my, how technology has changed in the past few years) except for the video done with Kylie Minogue. The difference is very apparant.

Audio quality is fairly interesting as well. I don't know if the problem is on my end, or if it was a manufacturers defect with the encoding on the disk, but the sound (particularly the bass) has a lot of pops to it. I also purchased the God is in the House DVD, and had no problems with that particular audio facet. I also found spots to where the tempos changed mid-play.

I would have rated this product lower, but I figured in the fact that the video recording gear came from the Stone Age...

All in all, a good purchase still for any Nick Cave fan. Many of these videos are nigh impossible to find anywhere, so if you MUST have them, buy this DVD.

Rating:
Summary: missing an option
Review: What is annoying about this title is that you have no way of just playing the videos one after the other without the little bits of commentary between. It's interesting stuff to hear the first time, but when you see it over and over again, it becomes annoying. There should be an option where one can just play the videos one after the other with no interruption. Of course, the videos themselves are as good as the music, which varies wildly from religiously centered songs that seem to suggest a hard kernel of faith to songs that seem to celebrate, or at least dryly relate, violent incidents. Despite the fact that Cave moves quickly from angels to demons and from the grotesque to the sublime, there is a consistency in voice and in the writing that gives not only this collection but all of his released music as a whole a consistent and complicated backdrop, so though as it is with all great "artists" one begins to be able to understand the whole of the artist only through beginning to understand the wide range of his or her work, laying before one the vast landscape of a mind.