Perhaps probably the most telling second on Wild God comes a couple of quarter of an hour in. A monitor referred to as Pleasure opens in a fashion attribute of Nick Cave’s current songs: the form of drifting, serpentine type, beatless and uncoupled from normal verse-chorus construction, that he and chief collaborator Warren Ellis started experimenting with on 2013’s Push the Sky Away. That type got here to energy the extraordinary sequence of albums that adopted: 2016’s harrowing Skeleton Tree; the exploration of loss, grief and redemption that was 2019’s Ghosteen; 2021’s lockdown-mired Carnage. Now, on Pleasure, synthesised tones hover and shimmer as Cave strikes a melancholy sequence of chords on the piano, alongside what appears like a lowing french horn. He sings of waking within the evening, haunted by a voice that seems to belong to “a ghost in big sneakers, laughing, stars round his head … a flaming boy”.
The plain assumption to make is that Cave is being visited by his late son, Arthur, whose dying in an unintentional fall in 2015 – and Cave’s response to it – has knowledgeable huge tranches of his subsequent output. Not simply music, however 2019’s Q&A format Conversations With Nick Cave tour; Religion, Hope and Carnage, the prolonged interview with Sean O’Hagan printed as an acclaimed e book in 2022; and The Purple Hand Recordsdata, the web publication the place, because the New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich fantastically put it, he often acts as “an sudden Virgil for anybody mired in grief and casting about for a heat however unsentimental information”.
This time, nevertheless, the ghost comes bearing a message: “We’ve all had an excessive amount of sorrow, now’s the time for pleasure.” On cue, the temper shifts, a refrain of heat, wordless voices seems and the french horn ascends skywards. The track ends with Cave considering the chaos and fury of life in 2024 – “All the world over, they shout out their indignant phrases concerning the finish of affection” – however striving for optimism nonetheless: “The celebs stand above the Earth, shiny triumphant metaphors of affection.”
Pleasure appears like Wild God’s temper in miniature. The album’s songs don’t stint on darkness – ache, struggling and dying all function, together with the passing of Cave’s former collaborator and associate Anita Lane – however counsel that life can nonetheless present transcendent euphoria regardless of all of it. The track about Lane is named O Wow O Wow (How Fantastic She Is): it’s gorgeously melodic, adorned with summary smears of vocoder and a phone recording of Lane laughing as she recollects their dissolute previous, and offers in reverie slightly than mourning. On Frogs, Cave walks residence from church, pausing to take a look at a frog within the gutter: “leaping to God, amazed of affection, amazed of ache, amazed to be again within the water once more.” Even when it doesn’t get far, the track appears to counsel, that’s not the purpose: the purpose is to maintain leaping.
The music follows go well with. Cave has reconvened the Unhealthy Seeds – who appeared a bit surplus to necessities amongst Ghosteen’s beatless drifts and who didn’t seem in any respect on Carnage, an album credited to Cave and Ellis alone. Wild God deftly melds the meditative, flowing sound of its fast predecessors with the band’s trademark muscularity (one of many enduring mysteries of Cave’s profession is how a band that’s seen one thing like 23 completely different musicians move by way of its ranks through the years, all the time sounds just like the Unhealthy Seeds regardless). The result’s a set of songs that really feel concurrently ethereal and teeming, not least with a preponderance of glowing melodies. They often surge into huge, ecstatic exhalations – there’s a improbable second close to the top of Tune of the Lake, the place Thomas Wydler’s drums, which have beforehand moved issues alongside at a stately, measured tempo, all of the sudden burst right into a sequence of gleeful, clattering rolls. Or the temper flips fully: Conversion initially sounds haunted and stark, earlier than exploding into life halfway by way of in a mass of voices singing and chanting, Cave’s extemporised vocal sounding more and more rapturous excessive.
The title monitor, in the meantime, is equally joyful, though lyrically indirect. A technique you might learn it’s as a sardonic self-portrait, rock’s former Prince of Darkness in his late 60s (“It was rape and pillage within the retirement village”), grappling with the dramatic shift in notion that Cave has undergone over the past decade because it builds to an explosive, cathartic climax, bolstered by choir and orchestra. Mentioned climax appears to reaffirm his religion within the transformative energy of music and communality: “In the event you’re feeling lonely and in the event you’re feeling blue, and in the event you simply don’t know what to do,” he cries, “deliver your spirit down!”
If that’s certainly what that track is saying, the purpose is underlined by the album as an entire. Full of exceptional songs, its temper of what you may name radical optimism is potent and contagious. You permit it feeling higher than you probably did beforehand: an bettering expertise, in the most effective sense of the phrase.
Wild God is launched on 30 August
This week Alexis listened to
Kyrylo Stetsenko – Play, the Violin, Play
The Gentle within the Attic label’s newest dive into obscure corners of music – this time from Ukraine’s 70s and 80s underground – yields gold: it is a joyously off-beam disco/funk/rock crossover.
