Sublime Songs: "O'Malley's Bar"

The Song: "O'Malley's Bar"
The Artist: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
The Album: Murder Ballads

Johnny Cash summed up his musical influences when he released a box set entitled "Love, God, Murder." Add an obsession with the nature of evil, and you pretty much have Nick Cave's musical output as well. Especially with his collective The Bad Seeds, he has meditated on all of these three topics through three decades of dark, theatrical alternative-rock. On Murder Ballads, Cave set out to master one of his obsessions with an album containing one of the highest body counts in music.

The epic centerpiece of the album is "O'Malley's Bar," 14 minutes and 28 seconds of sheer carnage. The song is essentially the ending of a novel without the rest of the story. A lone man enters a bar, orders a drink, and then proceeds to murder everyone inside, providing detailed narration of all his actions. He provides no explanation or reasons, but its obvious the man has deranged spiritual inspiration, often referring to his "wings" and lack of free will in-between snide remarks about his victims.

There are two things that save the song from being intolerably bleak and unsettling. First, Nick Cave is a master of dark humor, and its here in abundance. Punch lines are set up and completed a minute later, while the narrator/murderer switches between elegant and vulgar without missing a beat. The other wonderful part is the music itself, a piano led tune that takes back seat to the narrative, but still manages to create an almost danceable barroom shuffle. It sounds like a song that might be played in an O'Malley's, at least before everyone died. Altogether, its a brash achievement, a 14 minute long song that never grows boring or less shocking.