This thirteenth studio album has proved anything but unlucky for the king of Australian rock. The morbidly titled Abattoir Blues and The Lyre of Orpheus form a smashing double album package that simply must be given a chance on your stereo.
Recorded without long-term Bad Seeds guitarist Blixa Bargeld, and broadly split by mood - Abbatoir Blues is snarling and bilious, The Lyre of Orpheus gentler in tone. Bargeld‘s departure seems to have shaken Cave and his cohorts in the best way imaginable. Here, they sound energised and unfettered.
There was something very magical about the way a lot of these songs came about, Cave insists, breaking his regular habit of condemning his latest work as masturbatory nonsense. "We decided we would play any form of music that we wanted to. It was done with a lot of humour and spirit."
The albums frequently take the listener by surprise. Breathless offers the hilariously improbable sound of the Bad Seeds attempting to play calypso. Nature Boy is a rewrite of Steve Harley‘s (Make Me Smile) Come Up and See Me, and may well be the catchiest song this year to include the lines "I saw some ordinary slaughter, I saw some routine atrocity".
There She Goes My Beautiful World picks at the subject of writer‘s block, snapping disconsolately at other artists‘ means of finding inspiration: "Gauguin, he buggered off man, and went all tropical." The cynicism and bewilderment of this Cave's eye view is summed up with this gem of a line in the title track Abattoir Blues: "I went to bed last night and my moral code got jammed/I woke up this morning with a Frappucino in my hand." You can‘t really imagine anyone else in rock writing lyrics like that, but then, you really can‘t imagine anyone else making an album like this.
There is plenty of classic straight-faced Cave humour on Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus. And yet the double album is also peppered with apocalyptic references to social meltdown and war from above. Even this veiled political comment is a minor revolution for Cave, a die-hard romantic whose world view often seems stranded in the late 19th century. But nowadays, he feels increasingly convinced that "everything is f---ed".
In what sense? Political, spiritual, emotional? "Certainly political," Cave says. "And spiritual in the sense that ideals I hold dear are being hijacked by thugs and homophobes. The George Bush brigade is legion, in the Biblical sense of the word. I find that devastating, actually. To acquaint the name of Christ with that, it‘s anathema to me."
The artist now apparently known as Rock King Cave has been many things in his career, most of them pretty rum - heroin addict; leader of "the most violent band in Britain", the Birthday Party; playwright, eager to provide "a perpetual onslaught of pornography and violence"; chronicler of mankind‘s darkest impulses in song. However, Cave‘s life is calmer today than at almost any other point in his career. He has been married to former model Susie Bick since 1999. The couple now live in the shabby-genteel English seaside enclave of Hove, the sister town to Brighton, with their sons Arthur and Earl.
The album Abattoir Blues and The Lyre of Orpheus was released worldwide on 20 September, 2004.
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