First impressions . . . you know what they say about that. They're always right. Unless they're not. In the case of Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds' No More Shall We Part, they were decidedly wrong.

The first time I heard this album, it was shortly after discovering Cave via his latest album, Nocturama. Aside from and excruciatingly repetitive closing track ("Baby I'm On Fire" - fifteen minutes; seriously, read these lyrics - the whole thing consists of "the ______ says it/baby I'm on fire" with no extended instrumental break), his latest album is solid and enjoyable, and the haunting melancholy he's known for goes full circle and just becomes beautiful instead of depressing. Now, after I'd heard this album a few times and thoroughly decided I really liked it, I found a number of Cave-fan reviews disparaging my new-found joy. Apparently it's a bit of a departure for the group, and, as such, is a letdown compared to his previous releases. I could understand some of the points these fans made in their reviews - some of the songs try a bit to hard to "rock" when being creepy and dark is really what works best for Nick Cave. Overall, however, the album still managed to please even picky me - that has to say something.

I vowed to pick up any of Cave's more recent albums (No More Shall We Part, The Boatman's Call, etc.) when I saw them used, as these were the ones garnering rave reviews on All Music Guide. AMG gave Nocturama 2.5 stars - a pretty bad rating. As they say, "Everything is predictable and sounds like something Cave has done before." Maybe so - but it was new to me. Somehow, contradictory to how I feel about it, "Baby I'm On Fire" is getting the most attention, being held up as "intense" instead of how I saw it - boring. I feared that what Cave fans saw in Nick Cave that they enjoyed would be the very things I couldn't stand based on these observations.

Finally a used copy of No More Shall We Part came along and I grabbed it. I immediately gave it a spin and found that I really . . . didn't . . . like it. At all. Everything about it was too morose, too down. It was everything that I'd liked about Nocturama but overdone by a factor of 10. I could have probably felt average about the album, but the thing that really went too far was the excessive use of female vocals where they simply do not belong. It was during the last couple of minutes of "Hallelujah" (not the wonderful Leonard Cohen song everyone covers) when Kate & Anna McGarrigle begin their contribution to the album - two minutes of their soft, church-singing (read: not gospel) style repeating "hallelujah" and some lyrics. It was too much, too much. When I say "female voices where they do not belong" I mean - they don't belong on this album, at all, anywhere. This is one of those touches that has to be done deftly, and it just wasn't done so on this album. It's heavyhanded, trying to push the point that Cave's "got religion" a bit too far.