It's a killer

Even on the album's penultimate, orgiastic conflagration at "O'Malley's Bar" -- an almost Biblical bloodbath where Cave the actor ascends to a fevered pitch in his narration of the crime, boiling over into a madman's stammer and grunts and ragged humming of bloodlust -- Cave the storyteller keeps track of the bullets in the killer's six-shooter and makes sure he reloads at the appropriate intervals. He keeps the details on file, works them into other songs as if to test his listener. We are supposed to recognize, for instance, the rogue with the "Red Right Hand" from 1994's Let Love In when he reappears in "Song of Joy" just in time to kill off Cave's wife and three children. We are to remember his 1989 novel, . . . And the Ass Saw the Angel, when we listen to Murder's "Crow Jane," the blues after which he named his protagonist's hill-trash mother. And when he names Jerry Bellows as a victim (he gets his head blown clean off in O'Malley's Bar), Cave is again tweaking us with a vague familiarity -- a Jane Bellows meets her death just a few songs earlier (she's found "cuffed to the bed/With a rag in her mouth and a bullet in her head"). Are they related? Is any of this related?

Despite the comforting interconnectedness of Cave's sanguinary universe, he doesn't give us a reason to care. In the two score and change murders, he's at a loss to come up with a single compelling image -- one that isn't instantly laughable -- to justify the butchery. Where Cave aims for a cataclysmic symphony of violence, he ends up with a cartoonish sketch -- ultimately empty, though Murder Ballads deserves to become an instant camp classic. The biggest guffaws come at the moment of truth in "O'Malley's Bar," when the heretofore precisely verbose Cave resorts to describing an ashtray (which he uses to crack a skull in half) as being "as big as a fucking really big brick." Or when he observes, with wry detachment, "the strangest thing I ever saw/The bullet entered through the top of his chest and blew his bowels out on the floor." If that doesn't make you cringe, Cave & Co.'s cadaverous version of Dylan's "Death Is Not the End" will do the trick. Although Shane McGowan takes a verse, it will probably be remembered as German guitarist Blixa Bargeld's comical vocal debut, a raspy, barely enunciated washout. And then there's a staggeringly awful attempt to update the archetypal outlaw blues "Stagger Lee" into a pseudo-rap vehicle for Cave.

Elsewhere on Murders, Cave continues to indulge his fascination with show tunes. With the exception of "The Curse of Millhaven," a kitschy country-klezmer number with a giddy-yap oompah beat, the arrangements stay spare and nearly traditional, dominated by the piano's fractured elegance and punctuated with horror-cinema flourishes (woozy organ figures, ethereal feedback currents, and, in one particularly egregious instance, a woman sobbing hysterically). As a result, though the album is perversely catchy, it's shot through with all the pomposity and pretentiousness of a mediocre Off Broadway musical. But that's what we've come to expect from Cave's current persona, which is best exemplified by his performance in the Kurt Weill tribute film September Songs, where he cavorted melodramatically through an abandoned factory set while crooning "Mack the Knife."

It's ironic that he's rescued by fellow September Songs alum Polly Harvey, who effortlessly exudes the sensuality, refinement, and grandeur Cave aspires to in his smoldering after-hours cabaret-blues shtick. Not only does their duet, the traditional folk ballad "Henry Lee," turn the tables (she's the one scorned; he gets plugged and stuffed down a well), but Harvey's voluptuous melancholy reins in Cave's slobbering baritone and molds a majestic, stunning epic. "Where the Wild Roses Grow," Cave's duet with Kylie Minogue, almost repeats the feat. Although "Roses" is the slickest pop song on the album, Kylie got stuck with a number where Cave, playing her newfound lover, consummates their union by caving her head in with a rock.