NICK CAVE

No more shall we part

CD, LP / Mute

Nick Cave pulls every trick in his book, but far over ten albums there are a lot of them and he even has a few new ones. He has never been one to constantly reinvent himself, but Cave has never stood still in his endeavours either. Blatant ballads follow mysterious love songs with harsh beats. The lyrics are well crafted and an astonishing stream of energy and light flows through the whole recording, because the Bad Seeds achieve enormous power as a band, even when they ain’t doing a whole lot. Which makes this one perfect record with genius sparkling at any moment.

Suffice it to say, I love this record. But then, I loved it, before I even heard it for the first time. Nick Cave has always been one of the greatest artists in the musical field I know. So this cannot be an objective review. Even though reviews never are, this one will be even less objective. I mean, I bought the german Rolling Stone once, because Nick Cave was on the cover.

Which is also a goof point to start to illustrate the phenomenon that is Nick Cave. He doesn’t really make music that is easily accessible, or easy in any way. Not even his duet with Kylie Minogue years back was pop-music in any sense of the word. And I guess he doesn’t feed from this charts-success anymore. Nick Cave didn’t want chart-success. He even boycotted the MTV-music awards, who nominated him. To make this short: Nick Cave is a good artist.

“No more shall we part” seems to be an easy record, but it isn’t. Not really. There are a lot of undertones, double-meanings and hints. E.g. “God is in the house” is a deeply cynical reckoning with suburban christianity. “Fifteen feet of pure white snow” shows way back to his biblical fascination with the calling of the apostles, but also has a more overt theme of growing paranoid and insane in an insane world. Or talking of religion, even though one song is called “Hallelijah”, which is also the refrain, it is really a first person narrative of a lunatic who managed to just stroll from the grounds of the asylum. And no, there is no dark, murdering, bloody end to the story. The inmate turns back to his nurse and his medication by his own free. Which again makes you think, is he really insane?

Double-meanings and subversion of obvoius meanings or ideas meander through the whole record, which is why I mentioned, that it is carefully crafted and sparkling with genius. More than just a trap for journalists hurrying to meet deadlines, this is more the way that Cave sees his world: never showing you the whole picture, full of mysterious reasoning behind the scenes and someone pulling the strings.

If you have followed his musical output as closely as I have – and I mean nearly memorising all his records the day they were out on the market – you would be astonished at the amount of citations to his earlier works, but even more astonished at all the new sides and ideas he put up. Cave even uses septim-chords once, reminding of good old crooners, a first for him as far as I know. I am very satisfied with the record. Okay, so Nick Cave won’t care any about that fact, but then he has lost grip on his own destiny when I heard “The good son” for the first time. Now he is part of my world (and thousands of other people) and he might better realize what that means. But I guess he already did.

05/2001