Last year’s dreary “Nocturama” saw everyone’s favourite Aussie curmudgeon threaten to become as po-faced as the Old Testament he regularly parodied - a sacred cow, and a tuneless one at that. Happily, “Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus”, Nick Cave's 13th studio album (further proof double albums are hotter than ponchos) is a fragrant bouquet of melody, light, love and naughtiness wrapped in an unfamiliar joie de vivre. It’s also the Bad Seeds’ first outing without Blixa Bargeld who, judging by Mick Harvey’s expert boots-filling job, will soon have to change his name to Blixa Who.
“Abattoir Blues” provides typically Caveian walk-on parts for cannibals, butchers and the dead, but at its heart is a puppy. “Get Ready For Love” is the most uncompromisingly epic start to any Cave album ever: an intro-less barnstormer of swampy, squealing guitars and the London Community Gospel Choir bidding us praise The Lord. Interesting to know whether Cave told them he was being ironic. More gospel in “There She Goes, My Beautiful World” in which pleas for help from Cave’s muse are drawn back from the brink of writerly luvvieness with daft couplets like: “Karl Marx squeezed his carbuncles while writing "Das Kapital"/And Gaugin, he buggered off, man/And went all tropical” and a jiggly disco-feel which almost turns it into something by the Pet Shop Boys.
“The Lyre of Orpheus” is a gentler album almost entirely composed of love songs. Humour goes hand-in-hand with the driving blues rhythm: “Eurydice… said to Orpheus/if you play that f*cking thing down here/I’ll stick it up your orifice!” Jaw-droppingly cheery love song “Breathless”, with its “gambolling lambs” and “happy hooded bluebells” is so sweet it should be on the "NY-LON" soundtrack. You listen for a snarky pay-off but, apart from something about a defenceless rabbit, it doesn’t materialise.
It’s the fine tailoring that really betrays the genius bubbling away here, though: the little under-the-breath ‘boof’ after the line "Like an atom bomb" (“Babe, You Turn Me On”), or “Supernaturally”'s house-music pastiche.
This is one double album worth making room on your CD tower for.
by Anna Britten