Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
Wild God
★★★★
BAD SEED/PIAS
During the last five years, Nick Cave often seemed like a lionhearted shepherd in a time of global upheaval, guarding a flock with psalms and sermons of his own experience and hand. Four years after the 2015 death of his teenage son, Arthur, Cave wrestled with and stood in his grief on Ghosteen, a masterclass of surreal visions and spiritual tests. Just months later, when the world shared a new extended nightmare of collective loss and suffering, Ghosteen suggested a survival guide that was candid about the madness involved in moving on. So, too, with Carnage, a 2021 pairing with Warren Ellis that expanded the palette of Ghosteen and grappled directly with the world’s tandems of despair and death. And then Faith, Hope And Carnage – a compendium of frank and surprising conversations with Seán O’Hagan – functioned as a manifest of lessons, a kind of self-help guide for existential endurance.
Wild God is the sometimes-ebullient survey of what comes next for Cave, or of what it means to accept extreme duress as part of life and seek moments of ecstasy and transcendence, anyway. This is the first album credited to Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds since Ghosteen; the whole crew is here again, joined by Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood and a swell of rapturous background singers. As with Cave’s recent work alongside Ellis, synthesizers, samples, and even pirouetting vocoder loom large, but Wild God circles back to the gospel-shaded grandeur of previous decades, too. The tessellated choir during opener Song Of The Lake, the thundering harmonies and paroxysmal pleas of the title track, the angelic swells and phosphorescent horns of Joy: it often feels like Cave is forcing himself to stare into the sun as clouds finally break, to take in any bit of light a day has to offer.
Indeed, Cave handles hardship here with a light touch. O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is) is a grinning eulogy for Anita Lane, his former partner and long-ago Bad Seed who died in 2021. She shares a glimpse of their youthful adventures in a 2019 phone call; you can hear the band and its leader basking in her glow. Though Final Rescue Attempt details the excruciating loss of another friend in cresting waves of pain, it celebrates what they had and the fondness that remains rather than merely weep for what is gone.
No one can withstand acute suffering forever; it dismantles every defence we have. Wild God, then, is a deeply human record, the shepherd stepping away from his sermons to look for wonder and rapture. “All the king’s horses, and all/Ahh, never mind, never mind,” he repeats during the opener, calling back to one of _Ghosteen’_s most striking images and discarding it for something simpler – pleasure while we still exist. In that way, Wild God feels minor for Cave, settling into a moment of relative ease after so much trauma. What a wild gift, of course, to have that chance.
Wild God is out now on Bad Seed/PIAS.
LISTEN/BUY: Spotify | Apple Music | Amazon | Rough Trade | HMV
Tracklist:
Song of the Lake
Wild God
Frogs
Joy
Final Rescue Attempt
Conversion
Cinnamon Horses
Long Dark Night
O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)
As the Waters Cover the Sea
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