About

No More Shall We Part ended a four-year silence from Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. A best-of was issued in 2000, but no new material had appeared since 1997's landmark album, The Boatman's Call. With that record, Cave had finally delivered what everyone knew he was capable of: an entire album of deeply tragic and beautiful love songs without irony, sarcasm, or violent resolution. It appears that The Boatman's Call altered the manner in which Cave writes songs, and the Bad Seeds illustrate it. Two musical directors -- the ubiquitous Mick Harvey and Dirty Three violinist Warren Ellis -- craft a sonic atmosphere whose textures deepen and widen Cave's most profound and beautiful lyrics to date. The ballads have the wide, spacious, sobering ambience one has come to expect from the Bad Seeds. There is an ethereal change in sound in the uptempo numbers which are, for lack of better terminology, musical novellas. They plumb the depths of blues, yet contain glissando and crescendos from the orchestral music of composers such as Fartein Valen and Olivier Messiaen. There are places, such as in "Oh My Lord," where rock & roll is evoked as a device, but this isn't rock music. A listen to "As I Sat Sadly by Her Side," "Hallelujah," and the aforementioned track (the most "rock" song here) will attest that it is merely one color on a musical palette that is more expansive now than at any time in the band's history. Also in the band's musical treasure trove is the addition of the McGarrigle sisters on backing vocals -- nowhere is their contribution more poignant than on the tenderly daunting, haunted house that is "Love Letter." Lyrically and as a vocalist, Cave has undergone a startling, profound metamorphosis. Gone is the angry, humorous cynic whose venom and bile touched even his lighter moments. His deep, taunting ambivalence about Christ and Christianity in general is gone, vanished into a maturity that ponders spiritual things contemplatively. Humor that pokes fun at "churchianity" remains, but not as a source of inspiration. Over these 12 tracks, Cave has taken the broken heart -- so openly exhibited on The Boatman's Call -- and elevated it to the place where he has learned to live, and to speak from as both an artist and a human being – All Music