Vinyl Record

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Kicking Against The Pricks

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Kicking Against The Pricks on LP vinyl. A 1986 record available from Kilmorna Collection in Listowel, Ireland.

LP · 1986

Available from Kilmorna Collection in Listowel.

Buyer notes: 1986 LP, currently available from the Kilmorna Collection vinyl shelf. Pay for pickup in Listowel or ship within Ireland for EUR 5.50.

Kicking Against The Pricks is the 1986 Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds album that turns the covers record into a declaration of lineage. Coming after From Her To Eternity and The Firstborn Is Dead, it steps away from original material but not from identity. The chosen songs pull from country, folk, pop standard, murder ballad and Australian memory: Muddy Water, I'm Gonna Kill That Woman, Long Black Veil, Sleeping Annaleah, The Carnival Is Over, Hey Joe and Something's Gotten Hold Of My Heart all pass through Cave's theatrical severity and the Bad Seeds' unstable elegance. The point is not impersonation. The band use these inherited songs to show the older bloodlines already running through their work: guilt, violence, romance, melodrama, doomed masculinity and sacred dread. In 1986, with Cave still emerging from the wreckage and brilliance of The Birthday Party, Kicking Against The Pricks made his songbook feel less like a break from tradition than a brutal conversation with it.

Kicking Against The Pricks matters because it explains what Nick Cave was listening for inside older songs: fatalism, desire, punishment and ritual drama. It also shows the early Bad Seeds becoming interpreters, not just provocateurs, widening the band's vocabulary before the major narrative songwriting of the late 1980s and 1990s.

For collectors, this is a key early Bad Seeds title because it sits between the raw post-Birthday Party years and the more fully authored Cave mythology that followed. It is especially useful beside The Firstborn Is Dead and Your Funeral... My Trial, where its covers reveal the roots feeding the original songs.

Graveyard cabaret, country-noir, folk murder-ballad atmosphere, bruised lounge drama, post-punk tension and Cave's voice treating familiar songs as confessions, threats and ceremonies.

Recommended for: Nick Cave fans tracing the roots of the Bad Seeds' early language; Collectors interested in covers albums with strong artistic identity; Listeners drawn to murder ballads, gothic country and theatrical post-punk.

What kind of album is Kicking Against The Pricks? It is a 1986 covers album, with Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds reworking songs from folk, country, pop and blues-related traditions. How does it fit the early Bad Seeds catalogue? It follows the band's first two studio albums and shows the traditions that fed Cave's writing before Tender Prey and later narrative records. Which songs best introduce the album? Long Black Veil, The Carnival Is Over, I'm Gonna Kill That Woman, Hey Joe and Something's Gotten Hold Of My Heart give the clearest map of its dark range.