NICK CAVE & WARREN ELLIS
The Proposition
Mute
· Old Nick goes ambient for Gothic Western soundtrack.
Last year’s Lyre of Orpheus may have been one of Nick Cave’s most accomplished albums in recent memory, but no one would claim that it pushed any envelopes while Cinder – Warren Ellis’s Dirty Three opus – was impressively lacking in any features distinguishing it from its predecessors.
But now, as if to atone for that, comes The Proposition, a collaboration of muted Australian folk instrumentals and songs to accompany the Cave-penned film of the same name. It’s not a radically experimental work, but like their previous collaboration on 1997’s Boatman’s Call, it develops some ideas and moods that had not been fully explored in their previous discographies.
The film itself was the most violent I saw in 2005, but Cave has the good sense not to duplicate that in the accompanying music, whose exhausted lyricism matches the interludes between Proposition’s repeated bouts of homicidal mayhem.
While there are only a handful of complete songs here, they are among the most haunting Cave has written to date, and their variations fill the album’s 42 minutes without getting repetitious. My only complaint is that the music is never elaborated on to the extent that contemporary post-rock has led us to hope for from pop’s more mature practitioners, but this is still well beyond the padded and refried fragments that a soundtrack album usually provides.
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