Nick Cave has never been one to just "get on with life," to wander through it blind, intent on getting to the end with the least trouble. He needs to know why we are here and what happens to us when we've gone. And, like the rest of us, he'll never know, at least not in this life.

But his conundrum is our blessing. His futile quest for metaphysical knowledge is now the driving force behind his music, which is his release, so we get album after album of beautiful songs, matched in intensity by some of the best poetry that has ever been married to music.

"No More Shall We Part" is almost identical in style and tone to the last Bad Seeds' album, 1997's "The Boatman's Call": It's all intense piano-led ballads.

Long gone are the days of the reckless punk rocker, kicking and screaming his way to an early grave. Nick has become a darker version of Tom Waits, but preferring the church pew to the bar stool. Again he's bent behind the piano, writing songs about the supremacy of life, truth and love and how they can destroy sin and death, but without knowing why or how.

The closest Nick gets to carefree humor is on "God is in the House," in which a crime-free, Heaven-on-Earth picturesque little Christian town is built ("We've bred all our kittens white/So you can see them in the night") only for God to still refuse to show his face ("God is in the house/Oh I wish he would come out").

Nick's options are limited. He could resort to blind faith in a noninterventionist God, but he's too cynical for that, or he could kill himself, but a desperate desire to understand the meaning of life often runs parallel to a terrible fear of death. What this means is he's probably going to hang around and give us another 10 albums of this kind of stuff. That's something we can thank the Lord for.