In comparison to the gloomy intensity of his heyday, "Nocturama" is a bland, bloodless affair that finds Cave far too complacent with his current life to invest his songs with any real power. The irony is that in abandoning the melancholy and mayhem of his previous life-at 46, the former bad boy is now happily settled into his second marriage and is the father of young twins-Cave may well have cut himself off from the wellspring of his musical greatness. On "Nocturama" his emotional sun seems to be rising rather than setting, and the dawn of contentment, stability, and mellow middle age threatens to melt the dark heart of this venerated vampire, leaving it a mushy pile of ashes. Mere melodramatic exaggeration? Doubtless, but only in a spirit the younger Nick Cave would have appreciated.
After all, Cave built a career on his romance with darkness, beginning in the early eighties with his stint as the braying, audience-baiting lead singer of Aussie goth-grandfathers The Birthday Party. Even after leaving behind the riotous, heroin-fueled cacophony of his early days, when Cave was known to scribble lyrics in his own blood, he remained a creature of the night, bringing his morbid sensibility to the subtler sounds of the Bad Seeds, the band he formed along with ex-Birthday Party guitarist Mick Harvey and Blixa Bargeld of Eisturzende Neubaten. Backed by the Bad Seeds' ever-expanding lineup of talented musicians, Cave put his ominous growl to good use in savagely intoxicating songs influenced by everything from Portuguese hymns to Delta blues, metamorphosing into an angry, charismatic crooner whose bony frame, clad in black suits and topped by a matching pompadour, gave him the appearance of a desiccated Elvis.
Cave also blossomed as a musical storyteller whose narrative talents created a dark carnival, populated by drifters, drunks, killers, spurned lovers and other misfits, and fraught with backwoods religious imagery. I've been a Cave fan since the release of his 1994 song "Red Right Hand." If you've ever heard a Bad Seeds tune, chances are this is the one; featured in the movie "Scream" as well as on the cult TV series "The X-Files," it epitomizes everything that was wonderful about Nick Cave. Clanging percussion, howling background noise and the eerie funk of an electric organ create a baleful, jazzy groove beneath Cave's hypnotic incantations warning of a man who may or may not be the devil ("He's a god, he's a ghost, he's a man, he's a guru").
But nine years later, "Nocturama" is worlds away from the sinister strut that was once Cave's trademark. The rich instrumentation characteristic of Bad Seeds songs has nearly vanished, and what remains can sound monotonous, even labored. Cave was, admittedly, successful with the stripped-down approach he took on 1997's more introspective "The Boatman's Call," but that album remained gritty in a way that recently eludes Cave. While "Call's" melodies were stark, poignant and often bitter, "Nocturama"'s feel both simple and curiously generic; the guitar-driven chorus of its fourth song, "Bring It On" sounds disturbingly close to radio pop.
The music is still plenty mournful and largely minor key, and at its best evokes a plaintive urgency, such as that created by the brooding bass and violin of "There is a Town." But the overall arrangement is too weak to lend Cave, whose voice is not particularly strong unless moved by an emotional intensity he does not possess here, the support he needs. And when he does raise his voice on the album's final track, "Babe, I'm On Fire," pitched as a return to the Bad Seeds' hard-rocking roots, it's only to yell out 38 sound-alike verses above fifteen minutes of equally repetitive crashing guitars.
Cave's lyrics have fallen far below the standard he once set; robbed of their old irony, his desolate ramblings and pledges of love border on sentimentality, with cringe-inducing refrains like "You gotta sanctify my love"-this from the man who, in his Birthday Party days, used to shriek, "Hands up, who wants to die?!" Cave's music may have suffered from the personal exorcisms inevitable for a man at his stage of life. However, Tom Waits (to whom Cave is often compared), though likewise a happily married father, continues to produce lovely dark songs with the gritty edge that made him famous. Waits has also had his creative slumps, not to mention his six-year hiatus from cutting albums to explore projects such as soundtracks and even acting, both areas that interest Cave, who is also a published novelist.
The Bad Seeds might do well to check the current frenzied pace of their music-making ("Nocturama" was recorded in a week, and its successor may have arrived by late next year) and send Cave on a similar vacation, so that he can return with as many superb songs as Waits did on his 1999 "Mule Variations." Until then, I'll be listening to the Bad Seeds' Best of CD, avoiding their more recent work, and praying for Nick Cave's night to close in again.