And I do "get it" about Nick Cave - his songs are melodramatic; his flat, yet soulful baritone voice is melodramatic; the subject matter is, well, not really melodramatic but simply dramatic. I get it, and I get that Cave has found God in the last number of years. What I'm trying to say is, this album doesn't need Kate and Anna's amateurish vocals to make the point. They lyrics and song titles make that plainly obvious. Anything more is just hitting us over the head. Cave wants us to think of Sundays with God under the steeple, and he just can't let the lyrics and music take care of that. And it ruined the album for me. I put it back on the shelf and let it sit - I refused to trade it in, hoping I'd be wrong about the album in time. And I tried, from time to time, and nothing really clicked.

Today I pulled it out for the first time in a couple months, thinking that it had sat long enough, and if I still felt the same way about it I did the first time, then it was time for it to clear space on my shelf for other things I did care about. So in it went into the CD player. And boy, was I wrong. Very wrong. Not wrong, however, about Kate & Anna's vocals - I will never be wrong about that, I'm sure. But the music sucked me in, the melancholic darkness involved me. Suddenly, I could overlook the aspects I'd found irritating. In fact, they were much easier to ignore than the first time through. Plainly said, I really enjoyed No More Shall We Part months after I'd bought it.

First impressions are simply unfair. I know this, having listened to an innumerable amount of CDs since I was about 15 (numbering into the five digits - that's as close as I can figure) that music doesn't always reveal itself on first listen. If anything, I've come to know that more often than not, what pleases on first listen winds up being the album I don't listen to after a few spins. What that says to me is that the music is just "too easy." I listen to music not only because it entertains me but because it challenges me. The music that's stayed in my collection for 15 years (which is very, very little) has done so because I have continually found something intriguing to return to, something undefinable in many cases. I can tell immediately when something is not going to have lasting power with me because it just hits my ear a certain way. Top-40 type music, dance music, anything really popular (or trying to be) is like this - it's just easy on the ears, lacks any amount of depth, and is intended to really just be ear-pleasing filler - not long-lasting entertainment. In fact, a rule I've developed over the years is the Rule Of 5: five times through any album and you will find how you truly feel about it. And more often than not, the "easy" albums that immediately clicked have grown boring while the "difficult" albums have either failed to ignite a spark or have found a permanent space in my collection.