Last year’s Nocturama found Cave longing to bang one out and see what happened. The result was an album split between bawdyhouse blow-out and properly attired chamber music. It’s a record that makes a lot more sense when you realise where they were going with it.
Which is this twin-set, whereupon Cave has largely renounced the piano and resolved the schism, the tunes being built in tandem with the band and producer Nick Launay. For want of a better barometer, you can distinguish the two records by their beat-keepers. New Yorker Jim Sclavunos sits for the first set, crowding the tempo like a tailgater late for a date, while Berliner Thomas Wydler takes the second, hanging a bare brushstroke behind, smoky and laconic.
Abattoir Blues may not be the butcher’s ball suggested by the title, but it contains multiple new twists in the plot. ‘Get Ready For Love’ and ‘There She Goes, My Beautiful World’ suggest Bryan Ferry doing ‘Hard Rain’, with gospel singers clad in slinky silk rather than purple robes – not a million miles from the hellfire-and-gold-lame of Dylan’s Slow Train Coming period. It’s at least three parts the hot buttered soul-man symphony Mick Harvey has long threatened. On songs like ‘Cannibal’s Hymn’ and ‘Hiding All Away’ bass player Martyn P. Casey rises to the task, managing the not inconsiderable feat of finding dirty hot funk inside lurching waltzes.
Up in the higher frequencies, Cave himself has much sport setting profound/profane poetics against the voices of the London Community Gospel Choir, who turn from ghostly white to carnal red on command.
The songs are shorter, built around sly hooks (Warren Ellis’s bouzouki on ‘Let The Bells Ring’, James Johnston’s lethal Hammond, Mick Harvey’s guitar throughout). Cave’s melodies always rang with celestial import, but rarely at such pulse-racing tempo. On ‘Nature Boy’ (a sober cousin of Cockney Rebel’s ‘Come Up And See Me’) he reconciles both, making for ecstatic music.
The second set is pastoral pop with inbuilt anomalies such as the title tune, a blues-in-a-brothel reworking of Ovid’s myth with a gag tagged on the end, and ‘Supernaturally’, all Spanish castellations and flamenco drinking games. But ‘Breathless’, ‘Spell’ and ‘Babe, You Turn Me On’ are exercises in how to make songs of guileless adoration as be-still-my-beating-heart as those of still-aired sorrow.
Here are songs for lovers astray in a world threatened by odious forces. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds have made their masterpiece.