Oddly Alluring
by: peter naldrett

Nick Cave lives in a dark world, a world inhabited by depressing musical themes and mournful tunes. He can’t sing particularly well, his band consists of nine "bad seeds" who each look as though they have better things to be doing and the music they produce is, at best, mediocre.

So what is it, then, that makes Nick Cave so appealing? I’ve tried to fathom this out and still don’t have any meaningful answers, save to say that the combination of droning vocals, tinny instrumentals and slit-your-wrist themes do seem to work... somehow.

The magical ingredient that pulls everything together and stands it up is Cave’s writing ability. Not songs in the true sense of the word, these songs are more like poems, and Cave often delivers them more like a poet than a singer, whispering to great effect in "God Is In The House" and trying out words like "I left by the back door/With my wife’s lover’s smoking gun" in "We Came Along This Road".

The new single, "As I Sat Sadly By Her Side" and other album tracks like "Fifteen Feet Of Pure White Snow" also sound great on No More Shall We Part, which is, incidentally, not half as depressing as previous album titles like The First Born Is Dead, Kicking Against The Pricks and Your Funeral... My Trial. It’s good stuff, but it won’t break any ice at parties!