After a four-year recording hiatus, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds have returned with No More Shall We Part.  Never in his entire career, which has indeed been long and industrious  -- from Goth idol front man of the legendary early eighties punk band “The Birthday Party” to the his evolution as lyricist & songwriter for “The Bad Seeds over the next two decades – has Cave sang more melodically, with a voice almost free of the angry cynicism for which he is justly famous.  Or at least, so it seemed to me upon my first listening to No More Shall We Part, after which my first thought was that perhaps Cave, having seemingly made peace with many of his personal demons, had gone just a degree or two too soft. But this feeling soon passed – yes, No More Shall We Part is a far cry from Cave’s brilliantly dark 1996 oeuvre Murder Ballads; nonetheless, even in its brightest moments, the listener can sense the endless well of sadness that lies just beneath, sadness which bubbles right up to the surface on tracks like hallelujah which ends with the refrain “Tears are welling in my eyes again / I need twenty big buckets to catch them in / twenty pretty girls to carry them down / twenty deep holes to bury them in.”

 

No More Shall We Part might not be received well by all – certainly, it is the farthest away from Rock & Roll of any of Cave’s previous works (spoken word pieces excepted.) I found many tracks (such as The Sorrowful Wife and Gates in the Garden) just too slow, with lyrics not interesting enough to hold my attention.  While Cave fans expecting another “Your Funeral…My Trial” or “Murder Ballads” might be disappointed, fans of slower, more Leonard Cohen-esque songs will likely enjoy this album.

 

Much has been written about the similarities between Nick Cave’s more recent work and the works of Leonard Cohen. Both are among the most lyrically prolific and poignant singer / songwriters in musical history, writing songs, which, often as not, tell profound and often dark stories, and both are accomplished novelists as well. It's worth noting that, while few Nick Cave fans in 1984 (holdovers from his days with The Birthday Party) were likely to have been Leonard Cohen fans, Cave himself was. After all, he chose as the first track of the first album of his solo career (“From Her to Eternity”) a cover of Cohen’s “Avalanche.” That Cave’s lyrical & songwriting style is now faintly reminiscent of Cohen’s should come as no surprise. And like Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave has earned enough respect as a songwriter and performer that even a project such as this one, while not 100% to my liking, still deserves a tremendous amount of respect.

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At what point does it become acceptable to become nostalgic for nostalgia?  Case in point:  “The Velvet Underground – Live MCXXCIII.” I got into the VU in the early 1980’s, when I realized that 95% of the music that my peers were listening to – mostly spandex clad metal bands and big-haired empty-headed bimbettes  – sucked.  By the time that the early nineties rolled around, I’d pretty much heard everything that the Velvet Underground had ever recorded, and regarded them as a group of demigods who I was never likely to see perform. When the group buried their collective hatchet and got back together in 1993, I was overjoyed, and made plans to do whatever it took to see them perform live at least once. But, as it turned out, lingering resentments quickly tore them apart, and after performing live just a few times, they disbanded again.

 

So when I saw this album on the shelf at Tower, I became nostalgic, remembering how nostalgic the album had made me feel when I’d first heard it, nearly a decade earlier, when hearing it made me feel nostalgic for the Velvet underground I had grown to love in the early eighties (by which time, they were already nostalgia to most people over 35.) I’m happy to be able to report that Live MCXXCIII is as good as it was in 1993, which is to say that the songs brought me back to 1983, a time when I desperately wished that it was 1968.  True, the album is far from perfect. Lou’s voice sounds tired on some of the tracks, and at times it seems as if Sterling Morrison hadn’t performed on stage for decades (which, in fact, he hadn’t). Nonetheless, on that stage in Paris, the Velvet Underground were back. While VU neophytes would be better off starting with “The Velvet Underground and Nico” and working their way up, any Velvets fan that doesn’t own this album is depriving themselves; for on “MCXXCIII,” for a brief, never-to-be-repeated moment, four musicians shone together as only legends can.