‘I didn’t reflect on the songs again, or play them again,’ says Nick Cave of the material that he and his group, the Bad Seeds, learned and recorded in just one week for their twelfth album, Nocturama. ‘Once they were written, that was it.’

While this may have seemed like a good idea at the time, a little more deliberation may have rescued this album from the pervasive blandness that permeates the majority of the disc.

Cave shares production credit with LA-based British producer Nick Launaywho worked with Cave’s first band, gothic post-punk pioneers the Birthday Party on their 1981 single, ‘Release the Bats.’ Nocturama, which comes twenty years after the break-up of the Birthday Party, forgoes the dark intensity of Cave’s earlier work in favor of lifeless melodrama that goes down smoother than soft-serve. The heavily polished sound of the Seeds’ accessibly textured arrangements serves as an insipid but pleasant backdrop for Cave’s mournful baritone.

There are a couple of exceptions on the album that hint at the edginess that once marked Cave’s writing. The fuzzy, organ-driven ‘Dead Man in My Bed’ is a morbidly raucous rocker about a woman mourning her marriage to a lifeless life partner. Even ‘Babe, I’m on Fire,’ the drawn-out 38-verse finale, is a welcome deviation with jagged rhythms that are unsettlingthough never quite interesting enough to warrant a 15-minute song.

The son of an English teacher and a librarian, Cave creates tightly constructed verse, which, at times, sounds like it comes straight from a high school poetry textbook. See the line about harmlessly hanging hollyhocks on ‘Right Out of Your Hand’ for an example of what not to sing in a rock song. ‘He wants you/ He is straight and he is true/ Ooh hoo hoo,’ sings Cave on the piano ballad ‘He Wants You,’ which is trite enough to make you want to boo hoo hoo.

Like Cave, I won’t be reflecting on or playing these songs again.