Oh, how embarrassing! I mean, to hear one of rock’s all-time greatest vocalists pant and wheeze his way through those rhythm & blues rockers that make up the first disc of this double album. Nick Cave was once a man full of as much menace as he was class, but on Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus those traits have dried up as much as Cave’s throat. You can practically hear the hoarse air and dust come out of each gasp of his gullet.

Visions of a mysterious man who used to unsettlingly joyously stomp around on stage like a devilish ghoul telling black stories of the macabre have now been replaced by an old man desperately trying to show that he’s “still got it in ’em” after three dull, piano ballad-driven albums that tried to carry themselves solely by the misconception that age and a poor voice is equal to wisdom and class—the same misconception that Leonard Cohen has been relying on for decades now because hey, who needs songs, right? Just sound sophisticated and young people are bound to flock to you as their new hip father figure whenever their average life gets too unbearable. It’s all a veil, though—Nick Cave sounds like he’s going to throw his hip out any second when kicking a jig along to these rockers. I miss when Nick Cave wasn’t trying to be a third-rate Tom Waits.

All right, that’s enough. I have to calm down and be above adhominems. I’ll focus on the music here. The first major problem with Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus is one I hinted at already – the straight disc divide between the album’s rockers and ballads. To anyone with common sense, this is a horrible idea because you risk repetition with each song constantly going at the same tempo with identical dynamics and instrumentation, and boy oh boy is this album repetitive. EVERY single song here goes on for at least a minute too long.

Nick Cave is never afraid to play the same notes and song segments over and over again without change for the benefit of no one but himself, giving reason to the claim that double albums are too self-indulgent. Keeping a double album interesting the entire way through is already a big challenge for anyone, and the only way you can make that worse is by making it perfectly clear to the listener that you only have two kinds of songs you can write and nothing of further interest to offer in the span of an hour and a half. Double albums should ideally have their wide space used to really flex the creativity of the artist with a surplus of ideas of that couldn’t have fit on a single album. But no. Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus doesn’t even have enough ideas to make a great single album.

Major problem number two: the mixing. This album came out in 2004, and it’s already been proven time and time again that democratic production jobs almost never, ever work. What I mean by this is that Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds decided that each member of the band has a say in how the album is mixed. A good producer should have a good ear for each individual song and how the instruments complement each other, which are most important for each song and how those traits should be enunciated or kept more subtle.

When you bring in too many people, the treatment of each instrument becomes too neutral, such as the case with this album. Every instrument here is mixed at a near-equal volume level, and every note blends together in an absolute indistinguishable cacophonous mess with nothing ever popping out in the songs to grab attention or control the listener’s emotion through volume or instrumental dynamics. The idea of trying to highlight every musician’s instrument at all times has ensured that no one will stand out. When everything is powerful, nothing is. It’s the time-honored thing to avoid in production, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, not being particularly experienced in production, failed to do so.

But even still, Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus can’t be a bad album. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are too competent a band to outright suck, and it sounds like there’s some decently-written songs buried underneath the hot mess of a production job. It’s still a ruined album though, and since no parts of the songs were mixed to be memorable they achieve just that, and most songs leave no impression on me in the slightest as I’m sitting waiting for the next predictable flaccid rock song with plastic female backing vocalists delivering some unimpressive stock gospel wailing, or a weak and plodding piano ballad depending on which disc I’m on.

On most of these rockers, Nick Cave is just jamming the fuck away on a piano endlessly as if he’s more concerned with trying to say “Hey! Look! I can still rock out! I’m not too old!”, than with trying to write a proper song with strong hooks that show resilience and spirit more than just making a racket would. Hey, you know who were good at making an undeniable raucous racket? The Birthday Party. Mick Harvey occasionally plays a sharp and jagged guitar riff (I use jagged liberally because the mix makes everything sound flat) to tell us “Hey! Look! Remember when we used to be an adventurous and eccentric post-punk band!?”, but his point would be much better made if the riffs he wrote to demonstrate it were any good, like the ones that guy who played for The Birthday Party came up with. Wait….

When you get right down to it, Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus is just boring. The production destroys any chance of the songs being exciting or moving. The predictable songwriting and forced sequencing ruins any further chance of dynamics through a variety of different-sounding songs. And it’s all made worse that you have to endure a consistently unrewarding album for an hour and a half. Nick Cave clearly filled out such a large rock album because he felt he had to prove to everyone he still has that energy and spirit of rock in him, but after hearing an album that could have been decent end up so dull and lifeless marred by terrible decisions and overconfidence, I’m less worried about his aging body and more worried about his seemingly decaying head.