Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds : Wild God
It’s a wonderful thing to hear the Bad Seeds again. Nick Cave’s band, in its various lineups and permutations, has endured for 40 years, evolving from their origins bashing out abrasive gothic dirges akin to Cave’s prior work with The Birthday Party toward something more lush and often conventionally beautiful. But despite still being credited on their past two albums, the Bad Seeds played a more diminished role, 2016’s Skeleton Tree mostly comprising haunted avant garde pieces recorded primarily by Cave and longtime collaborator Warren Ellis, while 2019’s Ghosteen, recorded and written after the death of his son Arthur, necessitated a more delicate touch as he worked through a wrenching moment of grief and spiritual yearning. It was only in moments such as the epic “Hollywood” that Thomas Wydler, Martyn Casey, Jim Sclavunos and George Vjestica fully made their presence known, delivering a rare moment of stormy bombast amid ethereal, wounded lullabies.
But in the first song of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds eighteenth album, Wild God, the band—which currently likewise includes Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood—arrives in full force, radiating with energy. “Song of the Lake” arrives in maximalist fashion, Dave Fridmann’s mix echoing his prior works such as those with Mercury Rev or the Flaming Lips in its Mellotron-like synths and psychedelic orchestration amid a commanding, full-band backing. Though the palette isn’t far from where Cave left off, tonally, the feeling is markedly more celebratory, the overall effect brighter and warmer, as he sings of glimpsing the sight of a woman bathing in a lake: “With its golden touch, the light was such/That the moment was worth saving.” It’s a gorgeous, transcendent permutation of the Bad Seeds, made all the more moving with the addition of a backing choir.
Returning to this place, in which Cave resumes his natural state of being a consummate showman in front of the best live band a gothic statesman could ask for, was inevitable perhaps, but didn’t come easy. His previous album was as devastating as they come, a beautifully unguarded meditation on what it means to lose someone you love—to reckon with the certainty that living means grieving. And in parallel with that struggle, Cave more deeply explored his own faith, a process that’s provided its own share of challenges, as he explained in an interview with NPR: “anyone who thinks that an attempt to connect to religion is a comfortable thing to do hasn’t tried.”
It’s no accident that Wild God is as close to a gospel album as Cave and the Bad Seeds have ever released (other than, perhaps, The Good Son). It was originally to be titled Joy, which is likewise as fitting, as there’s a genuine and uproarious expression of rapture throughout, one hard earned through the kind of soul-searching that can bring people to their knees. Cave even says as much on the song titled “Joy,” a more solemn number despite its emotional invocation: “I jumped up like a rabbit and fell down to my knees/ Call out all around me, said ‘Have mercy on me, please’.” In the actual title track, Cave imagines God as “embedded in the world,” as he told NPR, much in the same way that he dropped Lazarus in Los Angeles for about a day. It’s as powerful and moving a song as he’s ever written, elaborately layering elements of guitar, piano and harpsichord as the title figure stumbles in attempts at reassurance: “The people on the ground cried, ‘When does it end?’/And the wild god said, ‘Well it depends, but it mostly never ends’.”
In its second half, Wild God mostly eases back into ethereal balladry, making an exception for an eruption of sound during the choral climax of “Conversion,” and offering a sweet tribute to Cave’s former partner Anita Lane on “O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Was)”. It feels apt that the album is split between these two contrasting halves, the aching dirges set up against the Bad Seeds’ uproarious gospel-rock anthems, such as the gorgeously rich “Frogs,” wherein Cain, Abel and Kris Kristofferson each make appearances. They’re necessary contrasts, and perhaps inextricable counterparts; on Wild God, both feelings resonate deeply, channeling the divine by expressing that which makes us most human.
Label: PIAS
Year: 2024
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Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds : Wild God
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