Somehow, Cave found a way to revitalize a band that had become almost a hindrance to his development as a writer. Although "The Boatman's Call" was technically a Bad Seeds record, with every member of the band making appearances, at heart it was solo piano and voice with minor adornments. For the two records following it, the Bad Seeds were floating and directionless, searching for a new identity as a band. The music on both had the stale, lifeless air of compromise, the band clearly chafing against the constraints of Cave's increasingly intimate, piano-centric writing. The few loud rockers on "Nocturama" were bones tossed to a pack of Rottweilers kept tethered all day and ordered not to bark.

With the new records, a new band identity has been found. The Bad Seeds sound fleeter, more flexible, less blockishly, Teutonically powerful than they used to be. While, like the Bad Seeds of old, they take some inspiration from industrial and punk, just as much of the band's sound is now drawn from big, glossy '70s rock (the downside of this is when they make use of a horrible group of singers called the London Gospel Choir, who make some songs sound like rejects from "Jesus Christ Superstar"). And violinist Warren Ellis, of the Dirty Three, whose prominence in the Bad Seeds is steadily increasing, brings to this record a new harmonic palette, taking more from Celtic folk music and less from the blues.

In their current incarnation, the Bad Seeds are, frankly, far less thrilling, and less unusual, than they used to be. But they are also a far more sensitive, versatile backing band, able to gracefully enfold and support the increasingly complex writing of their frontman.

The single most significant event in the Bad Seeds' recent evolution was unquestionably the departure last year of Blixa Bargeld, one of the few members who had been there since the beginning. Bargeld was the wildest, the most talented of the bunch, and also the most dedicated to pure, anarchic noise, the most incompatible with Cave's new, kindler, gentler aesthetic.

"He was such a significant presence in my adult life," Cave told me. "That he's not around, there's just a big hole there. At the same time, we were moving towards something that was less ironic in nature, and he was very much about playing the guitar in a non-guitar way. You know, that I have this sort of foreign instrument in my hands, and I'll make the best of it that I can. Whereas, if, in a way, Warren has replaced Blixa to a degree, and filled that hole, Warren doesn't play music in that way. He plays it in the opposite way, without any irony, and with a real love of rock 'n' roll and noise." For any longtime fan of Cave's work, Bargeld's departure was a shock and a tragedy. But perhaps it was necessary for the continued evolution of the band.

Regardless of the musical pleasures and distractions of "Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus," it is Cave's lyrics, and the masterful way that he delivers them, that make it a great record. His lyrical themes and obsessions here are what they've always been: morality and mortality, religion and violence, love. But there's a new energy, a new density, to the actual substance of his words, and a magnetic power to his delivery that more than makes up for the relative tameness of the Bad Seeds and the occasionally horrible production decisions. I'm not sure that I've ever heard a record (excepting, perhaps, certain Leonard Cohen releases) on which the music itself feels so insignificant, so towered over by the power and depth of the poetry.

On "The Boatman's Call" Cave wrote with solemn, determinedly unadorned simplicity. Here, the words tumble out, as stonily inflexible as ever, with the familiar biblical cadence, but newly complex and alive, full of poetic flourish. Listen to the urgency of these first two verses from "Get Ready for Love":

Well, most of all nothing much ever really happens
And God rides high up in the ordinary sky
Until we find ourselves at our most distracted
And the miracle that was promised creeps quietly by...
The mighty wave their hankies from their high-windowed palace
Sending grief and joy down in supportable doses
And we search high and low without mercy or malice
While the gate to the Kingdom swings shut and closes.

Or the more restrained poetry of the opening of "Cannibal's Hymn":

You have a heart and I have a key
Lie back and let me unlock you
Those heathens you hang with down by the sea
All they want to do is defrock you
I know a river where we can dream
It will swell up, burst its banks, babe, and rock you.

Throughout the 17 songs of "Abattoir Blues/ The Lyre of Orpheus" Cave's poetic voice is unmistakable: weightily rooted in the King James Bible, full of imagery of the American South drawn from both old blues lyrics and Southern writers like Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, and increasingly informed by modernist poetry (W.H. Auden is a particular favorite). "I try to write in a very deliberate way, with a lot of thought to the way the lines are constructed ... and in an almost outmoded language," Cave said. "That doesn't really happen in rock 'n' roll music, and it shouldn't happen in rock 'n' roll music, but it does in my rock 'n' roll music."

And he takes his influences very seriously. He's bothered by the inferiority of the New Standard Edition of the Bible to the King James ("It has things like 'she was hemorrhaging blood' instead of 'an issue of blood.' Ugh!"), and finds today's South lacking behind the romanticized version in literature: "I drove to New Iberia not long ago, because I was driving around the South with my wife. And that wonderful crime writer, James Lee Burke, sets his novels in New Iberia, and the way he describes this place it sounds like the most beautiful place on earth ... This was just Burger King and McDonald's and the rest of it. There was some Spanish moss and some purple sunsets, I suppose, but all seen through the golden arches."

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