THE MERCY SEAT IS WAITING

“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” This was rattling in my head for days like some demented mantra. The first time I heard Tender Prey, I was completely fixated on “The Mercy Seat.” Was it the existential dread or the thrill of being terrified that made me revisit the song over and over again? A mix of both, I think. And also because it’s an excellent song. Perfect, even. 

“The Mercy Seat” is easily one of the most terrifying songs. It’s up there with “Frankie Teardrop,” “Black Sabbath,” and “I Was A Prisoner In Your Skull.” All those songs are sick and sinister in their own way, but there’s something about “The Mercy Seat” that makes it uniquely brutal. Unsettling music is always some of the most daring since it inherently has to be innovative. There’s so many great ways to use narrative, emotion, atmosphere, and arrangement to instill a genuine sense of fear, and “The Mercy Seat” nails it in every regard.

One of Nick Cave’s greatest strengths as a songwriter is how he uses narrative in his music. Murder Ballads is the obvious example, but his use of narrative can be seen in his lyrics dating back to The Birthday Party. Lots of notable songs like “Deep in the Woods,” “Swampland,” and “Knocking on Joe,” but “The Mercy Seat” is the ultimate example. While all those songs are excellent in their own right, they were the precursors to what Cave did on “The Mercy Seat” in terms of themes and motifs: violence, God, repentance (or the lack of), suffering, etc. You know, the usual for Nick Cave.

What makes “The Mercy Seat” different is how compelling the narrative aspect is: the bleak depictions of death row, using religion to grapple with mortality, good vs. evil, and the narrator’s excruciating descent into insanity to affirm his innocence and resolve toward his imminent execution. Like Hubert Selby Jr.’s The Room, the narrator in “The Mercy Seat” is unreliable so you never know the whole truth. The listener can decide whether the narrator is innocent or not. But then again, doesn’t the narrator blame the moral binary of things being either “good or ungood” and how punishment is assigned because of that? But can you even trust anything said by the narrator?

In terms of sound, there hasn’t been a Bad Seeds song with such elaborate arrangements until this point. “The Mercy Seat” has the Bad Seeds’ usual dense sound, but to a much larger degree. Everything is heightened to create a suffocating atmosphere that matches the intensity of the lyrics, from the unsettling piano to the dramatic string arrangements. Cave’s vocals also play a huge part in defining the song’s sound. His manic and snarly tone is frighteningly in-character; in-character to the point where you feel like you’re going insane with the narrator. All these elements build the tension for over six minutes until that fateful, final line, “I’m afraid I told a lie,” that sends the song to its doomed conclusion. 

“The Mercy Seat” might be one of the greatest album openers. After hearing it, you know you’re in for a harrowing body of work with Tender Prey. You can tell things were rough for the band at that point, but at least it was to the benefit of the music. No one that’s in a good headspace or environment is writing about a man on death row, let’s be real. But Cave writing this while living through his own bleak, psychological turmoil is what makes it so effective.

“The Mercy Seat” is a poetic end to the 80s for Nick Cave. Starting with The Birthday Party, you hear Cave develop and hone his style by using narrative, theatrics, theme, and Christian theology. “The Mercy Seat” utilizes all of this in his most ambitious concept yet. It perfectly exemplifies his artistic growth and is the culmination of everything he did that decade. And almost 40 years later, “The Mercy Seat” is still one of the greatest Bad Seeds songs, if not the absolute greatest.