That Harvey girl

Nick Cave finds the bliss of love

by Amy Finch

Nick Cave's distorted scab of a voice always used to revel in the rottenness of the human heart. If his characters didn't slaughter one another outright and with relish (see last year's Murder Ballads, on Reprise), they just froze the life out of one another through an odd blend of malevolence and emotional distance. With a handful of exceptions, for the 13 years that Cave has fronted the Bad Seeds (and before that the Birthday Party), his songs have felt impersonal as much as impassioned. Although it's worth a laugh to liken falling in love to castration or a lobotomy (as in the title cut from 1994's Let Love In), such comedy does dilute and disguise sincerity.

The new Bad Seeds disc, The Boatman's Call (Mute/Reprise), finds Cave dealing in very few such disguises, and for that alone it's a wonder. He's in love, shamelessly, and his private passion spills over into these new songs in a way so naked it could be embarrassing. That the object of his ardor is none other than blues diva Polly Jean Harvey is a detail too large to ignore. Maybe songs should be judged in isolation from their inspiration, but it would be impossible to listen to Cave's rhapsodizing without seeing Harvey's pale skin or hearing the echo of her own music, a dusky counterpart to Cave's.

His music has covered a wide sprawl of styles: the tuneless art junk of early Birthday Party; the Bad Seeds' lounge jazz and resplendent, string-filled pop and hell-bent rockers. In the past, the instrumentation and rhythms behind Bad Seeds songs mirrored the complexity of Cave's lyrics. As the music snaked its way along, Cave's words piled a million images on top of one another, a macabre scrap heap of delights: "squirming flies," "warm arterial sprays," "pimps in seersucker suits." What with all those delicious morsels of detail, Cave could vanish easily into the backdrop of his own stories. And that's what he did, especially on Murder Ballads, his collection of black-comic tales that included brains blown to bits by everything from bullets to hurled ashtrays.

What's so stunning about The Boatman's Call isn't just its first-person feel or slow, simple arrangements; it's that Cave the human being isn't camouflaged or protected by satire or cynicism. In the past when he sang of love he usually cushioned himself in a pad of irony. On The Boatman's Call, song after song finds him crooning with an earnestness that never gets cloying or trite.

Starting with the disc's first single, "Into My Arms," Cave sounds more like Gordon Lightfoot, of all people, than the malformed Jim Morrison of yore. "Into My Arms" is austere and beautiful, just Cave with a piano, expressing his belief in the shelter offered by religion, if not a god. It sets the tone of The Boatman's Call with this expression of tenderness: "I don't believe in an interventionist god/I know, darling, that you do/If I did I would kneel down and ask him not to intervene when it came to you/Or not to touch a hair on your head."

That head of hair, and the Polly Jean Harvey attached to it, is the most touchable force on the disc. Which must've been Cave's intention, given the realism with which he draws his heroine. "West Country Girl" is steeped in too many specifics to apply to many women: "Crooked smile in a heart-shaped face . . . widow's peak . . . lovely lidded eyes." Still, instead of becoming private and secluded, this quiet, Gaelic-tinged homage does convey a broader sense of romance.

Same with the most striking song on the disc, "Black Hair," on which Cave again tethers his soul to the physical essence of his beloved. Against the taut rise and fall of what sounds like an accordion, he speaks of the awe incited by those long, distinctive strands. Over and over he repeats the title, each time as if it were the first: "Last night my kisses were banked in black hair/And in my bed my lover/Her hair was midnight black/And all her mystery dwelled within her black hair/And her black hair framed a happy heart-shaped face. . . ." (That heart-shaped face again.)

But The Boatman's Call isn't one big dollop of dreamy-creamy sentiment. Not even love can entirely cover up that lingering odor of rot at the heart of humankind. "People just ain't no good," Cave intones resignedly on one song. "They can comfort you, some even try/They nurse you when you're out of health/They bury you when you go and die/But in their hearts they're bad." Aw, if they were really so evil they'd leave you to decompose in the open air.