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*** Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

NO MORE SHALL WE PART

(Reprise)

“Honey, he’s singing about God and kittens,” my wife called from the next room, with a hint of disapproval, as we listened to the opening “As I sat sadly by her side.” The God is old hat, but the kitten is new, as is his spouse: “my sorrowful wife,” as Cave calls her, whose presence looms over the album like a piano dangling precariously out a window over his raven-haired head. By now we have learned to love Nick Cave’s melancholy torch-soul balladeer — we liked the young pentecostal firebrand better, of course — but kittens? We fear he’s having a midlife meltdown. “My typewriter had turned mute as a tomb,” Cave reports on the eight-minute “Hallelujah,” the wife having come quickly to her senses and left him to tussle alone with his sacred misery and loquacious self-pity. “Knd my piano crouched in the corner of the room/With all its teeth bared.”

Be that as it may, all the tricks from Cave’s last few albums are refined here. The slow-jams-for-suicides cabaret from 1997’s The Boatman’s Call yields “Love Letter,” perhaps his prettiest Leonard Cohen number yet. The evening chill of his mournfully pastoral folk settings (à la Murder Ballads) is cooled further by the ghostly harmonies of Kate & Anna McGarrigle, dour and clammy and dreamless as Dracula’s brides. In the middle of the album Nick has a sudden recollection of a monstrous band he once fronted called the Bad Seeds, and “15 feet of pure white snow” erupts into his finest Doors epic since Let Love Inýs “Red Right Hand.” Some marvelous gothic gospel writing balances an equally amusing disdain for common decency on the Jacques Brel homage/parody “God is in the house.” Then the wife reappears like a ghost and revanishes just as quickly, the kitten is mentioned in passing, the singer either does or does not shoot somebody (it simply wouldn’t be a Nick Cave album without a smoking gun), and the town and the church and the snow settle around him with an uneven stillness not unlike the unwary peace we keep with ourselves, we who live in rotten towns with our sorrowful wives and listen to Nick Cave records.

— Carly Carioli