Four years separated The Boatman’s Call and No More Shall We Part, which was the longest gap by far between Bad Seeds albums to date. Cave married his current wife in 1999, in between the recording of the two albums, and it’s possible to assume that greater stability in his personal life led to a lessening of the stark emotional trauma heard in such visceral form on The Boatman’s Call. Still, No More Shall We Part is hardly a sunny album. It continues on in a mostly ballad-centric direction, but injects back into frame a bit of the drama and widescreen grandeur that was absent on The Boatman’s Call. Cave’s piano still provides the bedrock for most of these songs, but for the first time, Warren Ellis’s violin functions often as a lead instrument, which lends several of the songs an almost baroque atmosphere.

Though it’s difficult to pin down the precise lyrical conceit of much of the album, many of the songs seem to work together to form a loose narrative structure, and in fact, the impression the album gives is a bit like the dark undercurrent of the wild, lurking natural world as it appeared in a great deal of nineteenth-century English literature (think Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights). Songs like “As I Sat Sadly By Her Side,” “Hallelujah,” and “Fifteen Feet Of Pure White Snow” suggest a sick shut-in, an impotent convalescent alternately imprisoned and empowered by his nurse, his neighbors, and himself.

But then again, several songs are simply beautiful ballads, dripping with sumptuous instrumentation from a twelve-piece string section and the gorgeous backing vocals of famed Canadian folk singers Kate and Anna McGarrigle. “Sweetheart Come,” “Love Letter,” and “We Came Along This Road” all fall into this pattern, but No More Shall We Part is also marked by several brilliant explosions of sound, from the timeless “Hallelujah” to the great gospel-tinted crescendos of “Fifteen Feet Of Pure White Snow” to the unexpected cacophony of “The Sorrowful Wife.” Even better is the quietly seething outrage and hypocrisy of “God Is In The House,” where Cave’s voice hisses and snarls at no louder than a whisper (“and at night we’re on our knees, as quiet as a mouse…”).

No More Shall We Part is something of a personal dark-horse favorite of mine, and to be honest, it’s a more richly textured, more immediately enjoyable album than The Boatman’s Call (even though the latter ultimately placed higher in this ranking). If you had written Cave off as soft by (or as a result of) this album, come back and give it another shot. There’s more darkness and shadowed menace here than you might remember.