The Double Soul of Nick Cave
Twenty years ago, on September 20, 2004, the thirteenth album of Nick Cave. A double disc with a double title, “Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus”and a double soul: more direct and rock the first, more lyrical and meditative the second. This is our review of that album.
Everything changes to stay the same. Take this new album by Nick Cave. It’s a double, it comes just 18 months after “Nocturama”, and ultimately it resembles it a lot (especially in the good way). And yet it was conceived in a totally different way. “Nocturama” was recorded in a week. This “Abattoir blues / The lyre of Orpheus” had a rather complex process. It was written with the “solo band” (that is, with the three musicians that Cave takes around in his theatrical shows without the Bad Seeds, like the ones in Milan last February: the violinist Warren Ellis, the drummer Jim Sclavunos and the bassist Martyn P Casey). Then it was reworked, calmly, in the studio with the Bad Seeds. From whom, in the meantime, Blixa Bargeld, guitarist and soul of the group, had left. In short, quite a shock.
Everything changes so as not to change, and that’s a good thing. The sound of this double CD, in the end, is the quintessence of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. There’s the direct rock of “Nature boy”. There’s the bad and dirty rock of “Hiding all away”. There are the lopsided ballads of “The lyre of Orpheus” and the more regular ones like “Let the bells ring”. There are the folk hints of “Breathless”. And there are Nick Cave’s voice and lyrics, unmistakable as always. There aren’t many new things, details that bring the image into focus, like the frequent use of female backing vocals.
Basically “Abattoir blues / The lyre of Orpheus” is an album that confirms the heterogeneity of “Nocturama”, which reiterates its chiaroscuro, between more introspective moments and other more aggressive ones (often absent, the latter, in the previous albums). Even the two albums are two sides of the same coin: a little more aggressive “Abattoir blues”, thanks to songs like “There she goes my beautiful world” and the drums of Jim Sclavunos. A little more delicate “The lyre of Orpheus” (in which the drums are played by Thomas Wydler), in which ballads like “Easy money” or “O Children” prevail.
The result is a double album that, even without any great peaks or great innovations, confirms the stature of this genius of popular song of the 20th and 21st centuries. Perhaps, this is the season of beautiful but not sensational records; records that do not amaze, but that confirm the greatness of their authors: Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, REM. This is not necessarily a bad thing, on the contrary. It is perhaps just a sign of the times, of the fact that a new generation of authors who are not the “disposable” ones pumped up by the English and American media are struggling to assert themselves. The others, the historic names, are getting older. They are getting older well, but they are getting older. But that’s another story.
