Nick cave and the bad seeds abattoir blues zip

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? 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. 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 But that doesn't make it any less satisfying.

It is a bit of a shock after Abbatoir Blues , but it isn't meant for playing immediately afterward; it is a separate listening experience. The title track tells the myth's tale in Cave 's ironical fashion, where God eventually throws a hammer at the subject and Eurydyce threatens to shove his lyre up his nether orifice. Warren Ellis ' swampy bouzouki and Thomas Wydler 's more stylized drumming move the band in the tense, skeletal swirl where chorus and Cave meet the music in a loopy dance.

But in "Breathless," the bard of the love song emerges unfettered at the top of his poetic gift. On "Babe You Turn Me On," he wraps a bawdy yet tender love song in a country music waltz to great effect.

But on this album, along with the gentleness, is experimentation with textures and wider dimensions. The sparser sound is freer, less structured; it lets time slip through the songs rather than govern them -- check the wall of Ellis ' strings married to a loping acoustic guitar on the moving "Carry Me" as an example.

Cave 's nastiness and wit never remains absent for long, however, and on "O Children," the album's closer, it returns with this skin-crawlingly gorgeous ballad of murder and suicide.

This set is an aesthetic watermark for Cave , a true high point in a long career that is ever looking forward. AllMusic relies heavily on JavaScript. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to use the site fully.

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Nick Cave. Cannibal's Hymn. Hiding All Away. Messiah Ward. Nature Boy. Abattoir Blues. Let the Bells Ring. The Fable of the Brown Ape.