Kicking Against the Pricks
| Kicking Against the Pricks | ||||
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| Studio album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds | ||||
| Released | 18 August 1986 | |||
| Genre | Post-punk | |||
| Length | 44:48 | |||
| Label | Mute Records | |||
| Producer | Flood, Tony Cohen | |||
| Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds chronology | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |   |
| Pitchfork Media | 8.2/10 |
| Record Collector | |
| The Rolling Stone Album Guide | |
| Spin Alternative Record Guide | 8/10 |
| Uncut | |
Kicking Against the Pricks is the third album released by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. First released in 1986, the album is a collection of cover versions. The title is a reference to a biblical quote from acts 9, verse 5 from Acts of the Apostles:
I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks
The phrase also appears in the Johnny Cash song "When the Man Comes Around" - "And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree The virgins are all trimming their wicks The whirlwind is in the thorn tree It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks."
The album marked the Bad Seeds debut of drummer Thomas Wydler, expanding the Bad Seeds line-up to Cave, Wydler, Mick Harvey, Blixa Bargeld and Barry Adamson. Cave would later downplay the importance of the record, but said it helped the band develop musically:
It allowed us to discover different elements, to actually make and perform a variety of different sorts of music successfully. I think that helped subsequent records tremendously.
Remarking on the song selection, Cave said:
They were all done for different reasons. Basically a list of songs were made and we tried to play them. We tried songs by The Loved Ones and The Saints and all sorts of people that never got on the record. Some songs were tributes, like the Tom Jones song; other songs we didn't think the song was ever done particularly well in the first place. Some songs had just kind of haunted my childhood, like "The Carnival is Over", which I always loved.
The strings were arranged by Mick Harvey and played by the Berliner Kaffeehausmusik Ensemble. "The Hammer Song" is not to be confused with the song of the same name from the 1990 Bad Seeds album The Good Son.
The album was remastered and reissued on April 27, 2009 as a collector's edition CD/DVD set. The CD features the original 12-song vinyl LP's track listing, while "Black Betty" and "Running Scared" are featured as bonus audio tracks on the accompanying DVD.
Recordings of seven of these songs, performed by the "original" artists, were later issued on the Original Seeds compilation CDs.
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Wikipedia