Kicking Against The Pricks is still a bit of an oddity in the Bad Seeds discography. To record a full album of covers at such an early stage in the band’s career feels at first like a puzzling move, although the ease with which they handle the stylistic variety nearly makes up for that. The album is also interesting for personnel-related reasons: It’s the first Bad Seeds album to feature Thomas Wydler on drums, who remains with the band to this day (which makes him, following Mick Harvey’s departure, the longest serving member of Cave’s band). The album also features Birthday Party alumni Rowland Howard (on two songs) and Tracy Pew (on three), the latter of whom passed away later in 1986.

Musically, the album still hovers quite closely around various elaborations of the blues and other American roots music, from the snarling murder blues of John Lee Hooker’s “I’m Gonna Kill That Woman” to the ghostly country lament of “Long Black Veil,” perhaps made most famous by one of Cave’s great inspirations, Johnny Cash. (That the song’s narrator is a convicted and later executed man could be seen as suggestive of the genesis of one of Cave’s highest points as a songwriter, “The Mercy Seat.”) For anyone most familiar with the version made famous by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, “Hey Joe” sees the most dramatic transformation, a squalling undercurrent of sound provided by piano and guitar effects while Mick Harvey pounds a simple tom beat. The Velvet Underground classic “All Tomorrow’s Parties” gets a mostly straight reading, but with multi-tracked male vocals taking over Nico’s original, and with plenty of cacophonous guitar from both Harvey and Bargeld.

As an effective demonstration of the Bad Seeds’ interpretive strengths, and as a document of some of the musical and songwriting currents that clearly influenced Cave as a songwriter and the Bad Seeds as a musical unit, Kicking Against The Pricks is a success. Still, for all the oddball musical twists and offbeat flourishes, many of the song choices feel a bit too on-point, and the lasting impression is that, knowing what music inspired the band, the listener is sure to be more impatient to hear the band refract those influences into original compositions. A worthwhile curiosity, but among the least essential.