If Nick Cave's 2002 album Nocturama was panned for being a musical void, a commercial vacuum, or a cheesy, worthless sellout record, then Mick Harvey's One Man's Treasure is worth discrediting because it sounds like the aforementioned album's little brother. It's weak, ineffectual little brother, trying to score fame and ladies, and worst of all, credibility on someone else's coattails.
Harvey courts the glowering pea-coat crowd like his mentor and his previous Serge Gainsbourg tribute albums Pink Elephants and, to a lesser extent, Intoxicated Man satisfied that craving. Now on his own, mining himself for material, Harvey feels confused, almost deluded with a sense of his capacity for dark, sensuous mysticism. The songs here are timid constructions, "Louise" and "Come On Spring" again, feeling like material jettisoned from Nocturama. Perhaps much of the criticism of Cave's album was unwarranted, and such venomous feelings hard to place, but listening to Harvey wail and strum on One Man's Treasure the inspiration for such sentiments are clearly understood. Songs this unconvincing reek of vacuous sellout.
Harvey is wrapped in the Cave tree, perhaps inexorably, and that seems to have sustained him through a career in such luminary bands as the Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds. While nothing in the Harvey catalog is quite as necessary as that in Cave's, his solo career has yielded some solid work of its own merit, making an album as limp as One Man's Treasure all the more distracting. If indeed we are to believe the proverb he mocks up in the title, one man's trash is another man's treasure, then this one finds its categorical home with relative ease. |