Maddy Costa
CD OFTHEWEEK
It’s not hard to see why people find Nick Cave irritating. The reasons are stamped all over his 11th album with the Bad Seeds, No More Shall We Part (Mute). Here we have the vehement, anguished, begging cries to God, the churning gothic atmosphere, the obsession with death and the histrionic sensitivity to portents, the mere presence of a song called Oh My Lord.
No More Shall We Part isn’t going to make born-again Cavians of them, but it’s a magnificent reminder of just how wrong the nay-sayers and non-believers are. It’s a majestic album, dramatic, propulsive, reeling with remarkable images, more resonant with every listen. Musically, the more muted songs (Sweetheart Come, Gates to the Garden) pick up where 1997’s The Boatman’s Call left off, but while that album’s lyrics prickled with rejection and the raw hurt of relationships in splinters, this one radiates romance perplexed and tentative to be sure, but more trusting of love and its possibilities. Each song, each style, is perfectly realised; Cave’s two-decade career reaches its apotheosis here.
That is, in no small part, down to the Bad Seeds: in the music’s ebb and surge, its contrasts of cacophony and calm, is a precise, restrained, mature orchestration that is utterly distinctive. The title song features nothing but Cave’s smoky piano, his increasingly crooner-like voice and Thomas Wydler’s gentle brush drums until the song’s final quarter, when drums and bass rise up wrapped in velvety swathes of violins.
If the music ranks among the Bad Seeds’ best, so too do Cave’s lyrics. Much has been made in recent interviews of the fact that he wrote this album in an office, nine to five the discipline sounds wholly uncharacteristic, but it has resulted in a set of songs that are surprisingly entertaining. Opening track and recent single As I Sat Sadly by Her Side is typical: the narrative husband and wife sitting at the window, commenting on the world and God, a playful kitten leaping from lap to lap is preposterous but absorbing, melancholy and strangely funny.
These are lyrics that sock you in the stomach, only to come back later and tickle you in the ribs. As the gap between real and surreal widens in Oh My Lord, a twisting, deliciously odd sense of humour emerges, not least when Cave visits the hairdresser and “a guy wearing plastic antlers presses his bum against the glass”. God Is in the House is more amusing: its picture of a religious community that rejects “goose-stepping 12-stepping teetotalitarianists” and “homos roaming the streets in packs/queer bashers with tyre-jacks/lesbian counter-attacks” is relentlessly, almost lovingly detailed. Cave transforms the list into an art form on this album: a love letter is “a plea, a petition, a kind of prayer”; in a graveyard lie “fugitive fathers, sickly infants, decent mothers, runaways and suicidal lovers”. The peak comes at the end in Darker with the Day, with the cutting words “Amateurs, dilettantes, hacks, cowboys, clones/The streets groan with little Caesars, Napoleons and cunts”: one of pop music’s more accurate descriptions of London society.
And Gates to the Garden, with its tender assessment of marriage (“God is in this hand I hold”), is a song to make the heart swell with affection, to make you run to a loved one and give them this wonderful album as a precious gift.