Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds’ new album is a collection of determination and confidence.
We recently celebrated the 30th anniversary of Jeff Buckley’s debut album, Grace, a record of so much promise and beauty that his accidental drowning three years later still ensures him a Nick Drake-style half-life.
While Buckley’s death was an accident, Nick Cave seemed bent on his own destruction for nearly two decades; he was addicted to hard drugs and personally often angry and confrontational. Although it was harrowing, reading his obituary at the time would have been no surprise.
It would be foolish, however, to claim that he survived solely to live a pain-free life, particularly following the death of his teenage son Arthur in 2015, a time of grief captured in the documentary One More Time With Feeling and on the album Ghosteen four years later.
Perhaps more notably, Cave has become known in his later years for his thoughtful and expressive dialogue with the world via the Red Hand Files, while The Bad Seeds, after decades of shapeshifting, are now rightly an arena-sized act. If you had read this in, say, the early 90s, you would have dismissed it as a work of fantasy.
Divine intervention or not, Wild God is the first Seeds album since Ghosteen (Cave went on to write, direct and co-release 2021’s Carnage with Warren Ellis). It features Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood on bass and is, in the singer’s words, “a more extroverted, band-oriented record” than its predecessor, which was largely a Cave-Ellis affair.
For those unfamiliar with Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds, the term “extroverted” may seem like an unlikely metaphor, but this is a collection that oozes purpose and confidence.
The opener, “Song Of The Lake,” is epic, with choir and orchestration and a solemn, oratorical feel to the words. “Never mind, never mind,” Cave intones, sounding world-weary but driven by dignity and fortitude.
The Wild God of the title seems to be preoccupied with more mundane matters (“It was rape and pillage/In the retirement home”), but he gradually builds from a grounded piano opening to the full celestial treatment at the end. However this deity is supposed to feel, there’s no question that he quietly disappears.
Discussing the album, Nick Cave mused on why it “sounded happy even though almost everyone on it was dead”. He has since declined to elaborate, but haunting is nowhere more evident than on Long Dark Night, where he is possessed by the ghost of Johnny Cash, while O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is) is a partially vocoded tribute to former Bad Seed Anita Lane, who passed away in 2021.
For lack of a better word, the proceedings here sound energetic, the sparkling piano melody of “Frogs” and its redemptive plea for the subject to “put the gun down” full of biblical references, an Old Testament blues the likes of which few can tell with a straight face outside of a Bad Seeds record.
There’s just too much love in the world these days for it to falter. And if it’s legitimate to wish a stranger luck even when you have no idea how that wish might come true, there seems to be at least some form of closure on “Joy,” with the nervous, hopeful prose giving way to baby-soft brass and delicate strings.
Nick Cave’s humanity is the reason he can no longer push people away even if he wanted to; perhaps he has now reluctantly decided to do the opposite. Changes of direction like this leave their mark, and Wild God is clearly part of a process that may end tomorrow or never.
However, he is still here to tell his stories, and for that we should all be deeply grateful.
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