Nick Cave and Warren Ellis – ‘The Proposition’ (Mute) Released 06/03/06

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The perfect accompaniment to a perfect film, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis have produced a stark haunting lament for the battered lives trapped and betrayed in the harsh inhospitable landscape so beautifully depicted in Christopher Hillcoat’s, Cave scripted masterpiece.

Utilising violin, piano, and almost wordless and intimate murmurings from Cave, the soundtrack strikes a perfect balance between tradition and modernity. Mirroring the narrative, the music moves from fragile violin laments and jigs to sudden almost industrial violence, distorting loops from Ellis’ violins but retaining enough of the original instrument’s sound to meld exquisitely with the history-spanning folk feel and not once breaking the evocative feel of a blood-soaked outback.

‘The Proposition’ opens poignantly with the traditional, ironically titled ‘Happy Land’ evoking a deeply unsettled past. Motifs and themes reoccur over the duration sometimes in different forms, sometimes the same. The spacious production renders what could have been a homespun nicety into a homesick displaced paean- this is homeless music- a lament for aliens stranded on the other side of their world, natives watching these same aliens destroying their history and culture and for everyone, the naked human frailty when the false truth of civilisation comes crashing down around your ears.

The insistence on rooting the music within an older tradition manoeuvres the sound away from easy comparisons with either The Dirty Three or The Bad Seeds. What is remarkable is how much the two involved have suppressed their personalities and celebrity in the service of the film this is not a collection of songs but is listenable as a whole piece of work. When some kind of redemptive release comes at the end of the album (but not the film) with an actual song, ‘Clean Hands, Dirty Hands’, the delicate poise and Cave’s up-close cracked vocal holds it in step with the preceding atmosphere when it could so easily have slipped into the more familiar territory of the two.