Kicking Against the Pricks by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Kicking Against the Pricks, the third studio album from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, came out on Mute in 1986 and found a man who'd come out of the wreckage of the Birthday Party singing other people's songs. The title comes from the King James Bible, and the choices range from tributes, like Tom Jones's "Sleeping Annaleah", to tunes Cave reckoned had never been done right, to "The Carnival Is Over", a song he had loved since childhood.

It was Thomas Wydler's first record on drums with the band, alongside Cave on vocals and keyboards, Barry Adamson on bass, and Mick Harvey and Blixa Bargeld on guitars. Harvey also arranged the strings, played by the Berliner Kaffeehausmusik Ensemble, and the result swings from gothic crooning to menacing, bluesy slow burns. Spin's reviewer found it a self-indulgent slog, and Cave himself later played it down, but he also credited it with teaching the band how to handle almost any kind of music.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.