"Babe, I'm on fire."
Nick Cave - "Babe, I'm On Fire"

In 1997, Nick Cave made the album of his career and possibly one of the greatest breakup albums of all time with The Boatman's Call (thanks, Polly Jean). It was an effort in modesty and restraint for Cave, who constantly labors under his obsession with Romantic literature. Pretension took the upper hand on the overwrought No More Shall We Part (2001), a dreary cycle of Coleridge-esque love songs and gothic narratives with an unusually heavy dose of Christian imagery, even by Cave's standards. He was in danger of falling into an artistic slump as stagnant as one of his abysmal wells. He didn't. On Nocturama, the Romantic influence surfaces in an idiot boy, a decaying garden, and a slew of archaisms, but it's the freshest thing Cave's done in years - rock antidote for a near-decade of inconsolable brooding.

"Come on, admit it, babe/It's a wonderful life/If you can find it" he sings on the opening track "Wonderful Life.” This comes from a man who 2 years ago sang: "Great cracks appear on the pavement, the earth yawns/Bored and disgusted." And when was the last time you could get down (in the colloquial sense, at least) to a Nick Cave record? "Bring It On" marries pretentious verses to a Top 40 chorus that gets more raucous with each repetition, and "Dead Man In My Bed" is a lurid shot of goth-punk that recalls Cave's Birthday Party days, all chainsaw guitars and crashing Hammond.

On the ballads, Cave seems to have developed a sudden affinity for cliche: "You've got me eating/Right out of your hand;" "He wants you/He is straight and he is true;" "You might think I'm crazy/But I'm still in love with you." But somehow, they're refreshing coming from Cave, who delivers them with a sincerity that undoes their triteness. He still gets frustrated at times, dipping into the boatman's dross for "There Is A Town" and "She Passed By My Window," but he redeems himself with "Babe, I'm On Fire," which must be one of the smartest “dumb” songs ever written - a roll call of persons, from "[his] mate Bill Gates" to "the hymen-busting Zulu," who think he's hot stuff (at least, according to him).

Cave rattles on for 15 minutes, often in the poorest taste. I hope it's as pointless as it sounds: it reminds me of the perverted punk he once was.

Darren Reidy