Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds No More Shall We Part

Arriving three years after The Bad Seeds’ inaugural best-of collection, this stately 2001 follow-up to The Boatman’s Call is also Nick Cave’s first album after successfully battling drug and alcohol addiction. Since 1994’s breakthrough Let Love In, Cave had found himself growing ever more respected as a songwriter on the global stage. Mostly valuing understatement over the threat of bombast, these songs mingle melancholy romance with Cave’s long-favoured Old Testament themes. Cave makes no secret of his inclinations with song titles like “God Is in the House” and “Oh My Lord”, but there are always more subtleties waiting to reward close listening. And despite the intimacy of songs like the opener “As I Sat Sadly by Her Side”, there’s a gorgeous cinematic sweep to the string arrangements there and elsewhere (observe the gentle crescendo finishing off “We Came Along This Road”). Cave and company never feel rushed; the early highlight “Hallelujah” approaches eight minutes, culminating in a memorable vocal section from folk legends Kate and Anna McGarrigle. The songwriter’s own singing feels more tentative and vulnerable too, as if he’s finding his preferred register all over again. Compared to the ferocious vocal turns that punctuate his work before and after this, these performances are, largely, quiet and tender. Yet there’s more here than funereal balladry: “Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow” rides jazzy piano and unabashed rock guitar to an uplifting group chorus, while “The Sorrowful Wife” represents the album’s closest brush with thundering rock catharsis. Individual arrangements are given intense focus by repeat Bad Seeds producer Tony Cohen; closing track “Darker With the Day” starts by hanging closely on quivering piano notes, violin plucks and bass rustlings as Cave sings nakedly of Biblical portent: “I found a woolly lamb dozing in an issue of blood/And a gilled Jesus shivering on a fisherman’s hook.” Featuring co-writes and several string parts by Dirty Three’s Warren Ellis, No More Shall We Part foreshadows a new chapter for The Bad Seeds that would arrive later in the decade. Beyond the band itself, the partnership between Cave and Ellis would yield many striking soundtracks from the mid-2000s onward, and by the early 2020s they were also releasing intimate albums as a duo.