Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: Abbatoir Blues/ The Lyre Of Orpheus

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * * * * )

Nick Cave is fair bashing them out. He's done an album a year for the past two, with 2002's No More Shall We Part and last year's Nocturama both showing that Cave remains a singular voice fronting a thrilling band of his besuited old mates.

However, neither were among his best sets, just additions to an increasingly thoughtful body of work. So it's a slight worry that, just one more year on, he goes and delivers two in one go.

They come packaged as one double album, with different names begging the question over their separate identities.

On first impression there's a gothic, twisted gospel overtone to Blues, with its pulpit-bashing opener Get Ready for Love and song titles like Messiah Ward and Let the Bells Ring. And Lyre of Orpheus - despite Cave's Milliganesque adaptation of the story from which it takes its title - initially suggests its dark heart is set on matters of romantic love.

So, a sort of hymn and hers ... ?

Well, almost. But the respective arrangements, the delivery, and the writing credits suggest that Abbatoir is slightly more Cave and the Seeds doing some collective howling at the moon. Lyre is Cave as rock man of letters and wounded romantic heart. It's not quite as lonely and brooding as Cave's last truly great album, 1997's The Boatman's Call, but it has echoes of it.

Together they make for quite the epic. But the beauty of it is: they work both as individual vinyl-length sets - Abbatoir as the wild ride into the night, Lyre as the plaintive morning after - and as a cohesive whole. Many of Abbatoir's early tracks are one bruising but thrilling encounter after another.

Past Get Ready to Love - which roars forth with evangelical fervour - it's soon thumping out the thrilling, warped blues of Hiding All Way, which achieves a couple of volcanic rumbles before it blows its top at the end, shortly after Cave has invoked dead poets, dodgy judges and a celebrity chef or two.

The first album's great OTT moment, There She Goes My Beautiful World, suggests Suspicious Minds-period Elvis. On those tracks, guest backers the London Gospel Community Choir certainly earn their session fees with their end-is-nigh wailing. Elsewhere, they sound not unlike the cooing girls that Leonard Cohen used to decorate his mumblings.

Not all of the Abbatoir tracks are delivered at fever pitch - Cannibal's Hymn and Messiah Ward are spooky numbers of swampy groove which sound like they sprang from the same river as Cave's Where the Wild Roses Grow duet with Kylie.

Part one ends in a perverse spot, ye olde parable of the Fable of the Brown Ape, about a farmer, a primate and a snake who upset the locals with their co-dependent relationship.

After the amusing, clanking title track, Lyre starts off by lighting some very big candles for a romantic dinner for two - especially on the gorgeously slinky, vaguely South American Breathless, as well as the hopelessly devotional Babe You Turn Me On, Spell and Carry Me.

It gets its own volcanic eruption on Supernaturally, which also invokes the ghost of the King as well the spaghetti western themes of Ennio Morricone.

The Seeds - when not offering vocal "hey hos" - spur the galloping number along like the dangerous old-school posse they are - and should Tarantino consider Kill Bill Vol 3, here's his theme.

To end, O Children, a slow-fused gospel-fired song which finishes everything on glorious if unsettling note.

It's a very deep Cave that you enter on this double.

But it's a collection that is a consolidation of everything that is great and disturbing and witty and literate and so very rock'n'roll about him.

His biggest offering is also one of his best.

Label: Mute