Label: Mute Format: 2CD
No question has ever divided the civilised world more than this one: “What did you think of Nocturama?” For every devotee willing to bask in the righteous glory that was “Bring It On”, there’s a hater who’s all too keen to remind you of the less-than-spectacular “Rock Of Gibraltar”. Me? Well, I liked it. Except for “Rock of Gibraltar”, obviously. That was shit. That said, if a band with a career as long and varied as Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds have only managed to record one song in that whole time that makes me reach for the Skip button, they’ve gotta be doing something right. It also means this review isn’t going to be particularly impartial.
And then Blixa Bargeld left. Surely it must all have been over at that point? But no. Like Phoenix from the… from the… oh yes, Phoenix from the X-Men, Bad Seeds have emerged as a really fucked-up superhero who can destroy entire planets when in a bad mood. (Not to self- Don’t buy similes off that dodgy bloke in the pub again.) And this is no tentative dipping of the Blixaless foot into the water: they’ve curled into a ball, waited until you’re right under the board, then dived right in with a double CD. A whole seventeen new songs. And bloody good they are too.
Accompanied for the most part by the London Community Gospel Choir, Nick and the boys storm through an epic set that spans pretty much their whole career, while chucking some ideas out in interesting new directions. From the moment Abattoir Blues starts, you know it’s not gonna be The Boatman’s Call, that beautifully understated late-night meditation of yore. No, we get Get Ready For Love, possibly the angriest Gospel number ever recorded. “Praise Him till you’ve forgotten what you’re praising him for/Then praise Him a little bit more” shouts Cave, and the cathedral fills with fire and brimstone. And you know they’re back. Much of Abattoir Blues is similarly inyerface, but don’t be too fooled by the thematic differences between the two CDs, much hailed as a ‘straight’ Bad Seeds album and a collection of love songs. There’s plenty of beauty on show on Abattoir Blues, and a fair bit of insanity on The Lyre of Orpheus, whose titular track displays an interesting reading of classical mythology, with Orpheus merrily causing havoc with his home-made Lyre Of Doom like some demented mythical Invader Zim, until Eurydice finally threatens to “stick it up your orifice”.
Not to say that both albums don’t have their poppier moments- the single “Nature Boy” looks like it has a very good chance of getting Nick another (sadly Kylie-less) go on Top of the Pops (possibly to be the first performer thereon to use the phrase “Sappho in the original Greek”. I can hardly wait), while “Breathless” has more than a little of Van Morrison‘s “Brown Eyed Girl” running through it. Only with a much less rude title. Lyrically, he’s rarely been better, or, for that matter, wittier. Paradoxically he’s at his best here on “There She Goes, My Beautiful World”, a song about writer’s block, in which he reassures himself that “John of the Cross did all his best stuff imprisoned in a box/And Johnny Thunders was half alive when he wrote “Chinese Rocks”, somehow managing to claw his way up to sit with both of them.
“Fable of the Brown Ape” sees him making a welcome return to the storytelling days of “Your Funeral, My Trial”, and is just plain weird into the bargain, while “Babe, You Turn Me On” has that Barry White-esque spoken thingy like he did on “Slowly Goes The Night”, although I very much doubt the Walrus of Love ever used the phrase “brutal nesting habits”, unless he was trying to pull David Attenborough at the time. Having started with the angriest Gospel song ever, the whole shebang finishes with quite possibly the most mournful-sounding use of a Gospel choir singing “Rejoice, rejoice” I’ve ever heard. God, and I haven’t even mentioned “Messiah Ward”, which is gorgeous, or the fantastic bit at the end of “Hidin All Away” where it all kicks in as he leads the choir in a chorus of “There is a war coming”, and it gets all apocalyptic in a way no amount of shock-rock teenage Metal bands ever could. Or… or the bit where… or… ah fuck it. It’s great. That’s all there is to it.
About ten or eleven years ago, at a promotional appearances at some record shop in London to big up Let Love In, he silenced a heckler with the memorable “We’re a middle-aged rock band, playing middle-aged rock music for middle-aged rock fans”. It was bullshit then, Nick, and it’s still bullshit now.
-Deuteronemu 90210 dedicates this review to the late Biscuits-
