Nick Cave has made a long and bountiful career of cataloging mankind's depravities, and how greatly these deeds contrast with our declared pious objectives. But moderation has never been Cave's strength, so when he opens fire with the immoderate double barrels of Abattoir Blues and The Lyre of Orpheus, it appears that he intends to fight audacity with audacity.
For the occasion, Saint Nick has again donned his Boatman's Call preacher darks. You can almost taste the brimstone puffing from his nostrils on Abattoir Blues's opener "Get Ready for Love", which-- in its full-throated gospel-punk regalia-- sounds like it could be the most raucous Blues Explosion track ever. This unruly blast sets the stage for The Bad Seeds' most varied and dynamic collection in years, an ironic fact considering that this is their first album since the departure of designated avant guardian Blixa Bargeld.
I'm not sure when it was decided that double albums now require two titles (is this Outkast's fault?) but the record imprecisely splits its quiet half (Orpheus) from the disorderly half (Abattoir), with only a couple of strays crossing the border in each direction. Compared to previous Nick Cave efforts, its most prominent new feature is the risky inclusion of a backing gospel choir on several numbers, a maneuver so hackneyed that even U2 has largely abandoned it. But on tracks such as "Hiding All Away" the extra voices manage to dovetail nicely with The Bad Seeds' more theatrical, over-the-top tendencies-- only the most devoutly secular will find cause to object.
Throughout his career, Cave has avoided overt political and social commentary, and on the surface, that remains the case here, with the bulk of Abattoir/Orpheus ostensibly consisting of love songs directed to God, nature, or some other nameless "she" or "babe." But it'd be pretty difficult not to notice the panicked, apocalyptic subtext that veins through tracks like "Cannibal's Hymn" or "Messiah Ward". "Do you feel what I feel, dear?/ Mass extinction, darling, hypocrisy/ These things are not good for me," Cave sings on "Abattoir Blues", a song which attempts to inject some humor into Armageddon. "The sky is on fire, the dead are heaped across the land/ I went to bed last night and my moral code got jammed/ I woke up this morning with a Frappucino in my hand."
Elsewhere, Cave struggles to decide whether the arts should be merely an entertaining distraction for an audience or if the artist has a responsibility to direct our focus on society's ills. On "Nature Boy", the singer gets advice from his father after watching a gory news report: "Don't look away now.../ In the end it is beauty/ That is going to save the world." And on the writer's block lament "There She Goes, My Beautiful World", he notes the link between creativity and the ability to endure and stand witness to hardship. "John Wilmot, penned his poetry riddled with the pox.../ St. John of the Cross did his best stuff imprisoned in a box/ And Johnny Thunders was half alive when he wrote 'Chinese Rocks'."
But Cave also creates escapist music, singing extensively of linden trees and cornflowers, red-breasted robins, and gamboling lambs. And it sure seems as though he slams the door on the notion of art saving the world on The Lyre of Orpheus's title track. In Cave's sardonic, tedious rewrite of the Greek myth, the music created by Orpheus' instrument spreads across the Earth like a murderous pestilence until God gets pissed and throws him down into hell where Eurydice threatens to shove the lyre up Orpheus' "orifice." (Unfortunately, this song sounds no better than it looks on paper.)
It would be foolish, however, to think that you could get through a Nick Cave project this ambitious without a few clunkers. At least here Cave's missteps occur when his reach exceeds his grasp, and the songs that fail manage to do so dramatically rather than boringly. If you're able to hunker down and dodge the occasional duds, you're rewarded at the finish line with "O Children", a straight-faced, full chorus number that somehow overcomes every inspirational music cliche (including a lyrical references to "Amazing Grace") to become genuinely beautiful and stirring. It may even leave you with a brief but powerful feeling that piety may yet someday overcome depravity.
