Australia’s Mick Harvey is a long-hauler who first hit the scene in the late ’70s with The Boys Next Door, a band he formed with Nick Cave. Harvey’s subsequent work in The Birthday Party, Cave’s Bad Seeds, and Crime & the City Solution is well documented, as is his solo work; Five Ways to Say Goodbye is his latest album, available May 10 on LP, CD, and digital through Mute Records. It’s a well-considered combination of original material and covers, most of them from fellow Aussies. Through vigorous execution and sheer consistency, it’s highly recommended.
Mute states that Five Ways to Say Goodbye is Harvey’s fifth solo album, but that seems to exclude his four albums dedicated wholly to interpretations of songs by Serge Gainsbourg, Intoxicated Man (1995), Pink Elephants (1997), Delirium Tremens (2016), and Intoxicated Women (2017). By my reckoning, Mute’s designated five are One Man’s Treasure (2005), Two of Diamonds (2007), Sketches from the Book of the Dead (2011), Four (Acts of Love) (2013), and this one.
More recently, Harvey has completed two collaborations, The Fall and Rise of Edgar Bourchier and the Horrors of War with Christopher Richard Barker (2018) and Phantasmagoria in Blue with Amanda Acevedo (2023). There’s also the soundtrack album Waves of Anzac/The Journey (2020), with the second of its two scores recorded with The Letter String Quartet.
Of the five solo records listed above, Sketches from the Book of the Dead sticks out, as it’s the only one in the bunch that consists entirely of original compositions. Five Ways to Say Goodbye is an inspired continuation of the originals and interpretations approach, opening with one of Harvey’s own, “Heaven’s Gate.” It’s full bodied, calm but intense, and through a foundation of baroque strings, uncommonly gorgeous.
The first cover, “We Had an Island” by The Fatal Shore, brings the strength and deep feeling of Harvey’s voice to the fore, though the accompaniment is no less beautiful. A version of Ed Kuepper’s “Demolition” follows, the strings even richer, the strumming sturdy and the vocals warm, as the flow takes on an increasingly unsettling rhythmic edge.
Harvey’s original “The Art of Darkness” thrives on a gradually building tension that never spills over the edge, while a cover of David McCombs’ “Setting You Free” starts out lively and follows through with considerable dynamic range, soaring with wild discordance, scaling back to just voice and pizzicato strings, and then back again.
“Setting You Free” is in contrast to much of Five Ways to Say Goodbye’s more reflective moods and steadily rising crescendos, these modes intertwining in Harvey original “Alone with the Stars.” A cover of Lo Carmen’s “Nashville High” is brighter but with traces of melancholy ache still extant (note that this album highlight is a bonus cut on the vinyl’s digital download).
The comparatively tranquil “Ghost Ships” is the last of the record’s Aussie covers, being a version of a tune by The Saints. It’s followed by a solid reading of Lee Hazelwood’s “Dirtnap Stories” (with Acevedo joining on vocals) that really amplifies the song’s serious tone. The final Harvey original, “When We Were Beautiful and Young,” is a gripping rumination of memory and loss and the passing of time that sets up an exquisite double whammy of covers, a translation of Marlene Deitrich’s “A Suitcase in Berlin” and a startlingly powerful rendering of Neil Young’s “Like a Hurricane” (the other vinyl bonus cut).
Altogether, Five Ways to Say Goodbye is another stirring collection from one of Australia’s most reliable musical figures.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
