Forty years into their collaboration, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds have returned after a five year hiatus with a gem of an album. A worthy successor to 2019’s Ghosteen, Cave began writing Wild God on New Year’s Day in 2023. Co-produced by Cave and longtime collaborator Warren Ellis, the album was recorded between Miraval Studio in Provence and London’s Soundtree studio.
Spanning ten songs, there’s an overriding feeling of joy in the work. In fact, Cave has included a song by the same name and for a moment, Joy was in the running as the album’s title.
The title track feels like a distant cousin to Tim Rose’s version of Hey Joe. Song Of The Lake, which opens the album, somehow infusing the ghost of Bob Dylan’s All The Tired Horses. Cave rarely runs from an influence; if anything, he runs into them. While there are echoes of gothic blues in Cave’s lyrics such as ‘Ushering in the week, he knelt down/Crushed his brother’s head in with a bone’, the words are pitted against arrangements recruiting choirs and a sonic sense of ascension.
There’s a sense of rapture in the playing and a similar intensity to Cave’s vocal performance. The songs themselves oscillate sonically, but are fundamentally ‘Cave-esque’ in lyric and mood.
It’s clear to anyone listening, or to anyone reading Cave’s literary collaboration with Sean O’Hagan (Faith, Hope and Carnage) or the Red Hand Files, that all Cave’s work is now underscored by the loss of his sons Arthur and Jethro. ‘After that, nothing really hurt again’ he sings on one of the album’s highlights, Final Rescue Attempt.
On the aforementioned Joy, we assume the artist is visited by the ghost of Arthur and there’s an acceptance that comes with the line ‘We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy.’
The textures of the album have been mixed big by David Fridmann, almost as big as the love, sincerity and sense of abject gratitude that permeates the music. Here, a tune like O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is) ‒ a tribute to Anita Lane ‒ hangs in the air as one of Cave’s most treasured pieces since Into My Arms.
The album is mournful on one side of the coin and majestic on the other. As with all Cave’s albums, I’m here for the humour as well. Kris Kristofferson’s dirty shirt from Sunday Morning Coming Down appears in Frogs and there’s the beautiful couplet on the title track that goes: ‘All through his memory in which he was entombed/It was rape and pillage in the retirement village.’
Alongside the Bad Seeds, there are additional performances from Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood (bass) and Luis Almau (nylon string guitar, acoustic guitar). The group tip their hat to the past, but there’s a momentum that continues to move Cave and his cohorts’ work forward. Strangely, the Bad Seeds have numbered almost two dozen players over the years but they always manage to sound like the Bad Seeds.
‘I hope the album has the effect on listeners that it’s had on me,’ Cave explained recently. ‘It bursts out of the speaker and I get swept up with it. It’s a complicated record, but it’s also deeply and joyously infectious. There’s no f**king around with this record. When it hits, it hits. It lifts you. It moves you. I love that about it.’
After his Carnage collaboration with Warren Ellis in 2021, Wild God will go down as one of Cave’s late period masterpieces.
PHOTO of Nick Cave at top of story by Megan Cullen
