No More Shall We Part by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

I prefer it when the storyteller immerses himself so deeply in the tale he is recounting that fact becomes indistinguishable from fiction, reality and fantasy blur into one. Nick Cave's songs are inhabited by artifice and surreal creatures?God, "a guy with plastic antlers," the apostles, dead wives?yet they never cease being believable. Cave sings with such obvious relish, and such an instinctive grasp of when to testify and when to shut the fuck up, that all characters burst into sudden, intoxicating life. Or death, as it may take them.

That's my first point. Cave is a master of his art: he makes the imagined real. When we last heard from Cave, at the time of 1997's The Boatman's Call, we had both hoped and feared he was turning himself into a more soulful Sinatra for the 21st century. The piano-led torch song "Into My Arms" was proof enough of this. Cave is too smart and subtle to be led down any alley, however attractively presented. No More Shall We Part retains more of his vigor and swaggering humor of old than in 1997, as songs like the tempestuous "Oh My Lord" show, the violin wailing up a gale of emotion. "As I Sat Sadly by Her Side" might seem to be a straightforward love song, mixed in with a few quiet words of religious import, but it has a smart little turn at the end that keeps the listener guessing as to exactly where Cave's character fits in.

Also, Sinatra would never have been so bold as to so thoroughly mock, and spitefully pull apart, cherished American small-town values the way Cave does on the brilliantly cruel "God Is in the House." Here he manages the neat trick of simultaneously recalling Dr. Seuss, James Stewart and Doonesbury as he spits out the words, "Homos roaming the streets in packs/Queer bashers with tire-jacks/Lesbian counterattacks/That stuff is for the big cities/Our town is very pretty," before nearly giving up in disgust. The meter of the rhyme is jaw-droppingly oblique, the violin solo peerless.

During his concerts of the past few years, Cave has cut a romantic, solitary figure at the piano: lighting cigarettes between songs, fumbling through lyric sheets. He was perfectly complemented by Bad Seed and Dirty Three leader Warren Ellis?a wild man on violin, back to the audience, wrenching passion from his instrument, hurling great arcs of phlegm into the air, stamping his feet. The pair would duet together on an almost jazz-eccentric encore of the Birthday Party's "Dead Joe," Cave's hair flailing as of old as he thumped the keys. The pair?and yes, as talented as Mick Harvey and Blixa Bargeld and company are, No More Shall We Part is most definitely Cave and Ellis' baby?learned much from those live outings. This record is a towering achievement, even for artists with their heritage.

On The Boatman's Call Cave discovered God, albeit the vengeful God of the Old Testament. The album thus neatly complemented the previous year's darkly humorous collection, Murder Ballads. The new album is better than both, and recalls both?most obviously on the violin-led icy cold revenge fantasy "Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow" and "We Came Along This Road." Maybe you should forget God. Death is in the house, particularly when Cave's characters start examining their feelings of love and despair and betrothal. "Hallelujah" sounds stark and unsettling, just the pure voices of the McGarrigle sisters calling out the lament, "Twenty pretty girls to carry them down/And 20 deep holes to bury them in." The women return to add support on the doom-laden final song, "Darker with the Day," Cave pulling his usual trick of fitting in too many words for the slow, almost sepulchral music: one long list of people to hate, and flowers to smell.