He is a wild god who passes through songs and travels restlessly chasing a mirage. He is a man torn by doubts and pain. He is a half mystic enraptured by a vision of beauty that is both carnal and spiritual. He is an ex-lover who abandons himself to memories. He is a holy sinner. There are ten versions of Nick Cave on his new album with the Bad Seeds, one for each song of Wild God. And everyone, or almost everyone, yearns for the same glorious ending. Listening to the album, you learn to want it too. And it comes every time, often in the form of a prodigious and otherworldly female choir singing words of joy and absolute love.
Wild God it's Nick Cave's version of a Harlem mass, a liminal experience between sleep and consciousness, myth and reality. It's one of those records that say simple things and do it in a poetic way, the kind that only greats like him or Cohen in his time can afford to do. It's a pop ceremony in which each piece tells a transformative experience, it's a parable about love set in a world that is this, but also another. As if attracted by a mysterious force, this load of music and words, of sounds and emotions starts from some misery, sometimes again the death of a child, and tends inexorably towards a form of ecstatic realization or if you prefer pure and simple and elementary happiness. It's a hallelujah to life as it is, for better or for worse. It's a record that shouts joy, joy, joy.
It had been five years since Nick Cave had made an album with the Bad Seeds. In the meantime, he has strengthened his collaborative bond with Warren Ellis, with whom he wrote and produced not only the album of songs Carnage to which the film is linked This Much I Know to Be Truebut also various soundtracks, from The Snow Panther to Blonde until recently Amy. It doesn't mean that Wild God is an album like the old Bad Seeds ones. It is not, it could not be, there are no performances charged with that absurd intensity that bordered on violence. And yet, much more than Ghosteen of 2019, is the album of a collective (which includes not only the Bad Seeds but also the backing singers of the Double R Collective, Colin Greenwood of Radiohead on bass, Luis Almau on acoustic guitars) that surrounds and I would say embraces the singer who is at the center of the scene and tells his parables with a firm and vivid voice, almost like an evangelist. And it is a credible voice, in every sense even if these songs sometimes seem like fairy tales and sometimes passages from the Bible. And perhaps this is what we desperately need today, credible voices.
Leaving the dialogue between two people with Ellis, who is co-author of all the music here, did Cave good. Like the previous ones, Wild God It's an album that requires a bit of devotion in order to be appreciated, but it's definitely more lively and full of positivity than Ghosteenwhich makes it easier to listen to despite being far from the canons of today's music. But Nick Cave is now a story in itself, far from our modest contemporaneity. The caliber is that of the best works of the mature Cave. If his other albums could seem at times too verbose, too personal, too introverted to hit, this one is made to move you and move you. The spirit is that of the concerts with the Bad Seeds that he has recently taken around, making an epic one at the Verona Arena.
There is a strong call to be present in one's existence, now, now. There is no thought of the future, the past must be left behind, the imperative is to accept and embrace life. To believe in others to return to believing in oneself. You can hear it for example in the title track, a fairy tale in which it is easy to see Cave as the protagonist, a spirit that enters and exits the past, from his own songs, from places in the world in search of something that we will discover to be a form of collective and euphoric transcendence, with the image of the man with long hair that runs through this and other songs inspired by the verses of St. John of the Cross: “The breeze of high peaks, when I loosened his hair, with his light hand wounded my neck and ravished all my senses in ecstasy”.
Before Wild God there is another fabulous song called Song of the Lakeanother fairytale scene about a man witnessing the beauty of a woman who is both immense and painful, who is painful because she is immense. It is joy from the title Joywhich has a text that harks back to the blues canon and is a mixture of phenomenal images, pain, mourning, dream, with a chorus that is a comforting hug, to us and to the singer, and the image of a ghost with a pair of huge sports shoes on his feet (his son?) who tells him that “we've had too many sorrows, it's time for joy”. The best is to be Frogsfrogs splashing happily in a pond and jumping high. Perhaps they too aim unknowingly at transcendence or infinity and it matters little if every time they fall back down, into the mud.
Wild God It's also a record about women trying to save men (Final Rescue Attemptperhaps for his wife Susie Beck), of mystical encounters (Conversionwith another prodigious chorus and a title that makes it clear that all these songs ultimately tell of conversions of some kind), of dreams that eat up reality (Long Dark Night). It is scored with a mix of the warm sound of the mature Bad Seeds, occasional orchestral interventions that resemble a benevolent storm, choirs and voices that flutter around that of the protagonist. Often, more than songs constructed in a traditional way they are musical stories, but unlike many other recent Cave albums Wild God it is deliberately accessible, full of direct, simple, very human, pop emotion.
The wild and nihilistic days of the Bad Seeds are gone, past, behind them. From shadows of evil Cave has reconverted them into apostles of good. Wild God is the point of arrival, perhaps only temporary, of the path of the character's evolution and exploration of the pain that began with the death of his son Arthur. Here everything is illuminated. It is life that asserts itself after death. “Get ready for love”, Cave sang twenty years ago, but not even that explosive song could prepare us for these “triumphant metaphors of love”, for this theater of positive feelings that only a madman could consider do-gooder, for this sound that is rock but also soul and gospel and seems like a wave that is difficult if not useless to resist.
And what an ending. First O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)dedicated to Anita Lane, a sweet and rustic portrait that has something of a fairy tale (again), a trap well-planned by Cave and his team to make you fall in love with her and then make you emotional when a message left in 2019 on the singer's answering machine plays. And finally As the Waters Cover the Seaan image taken from the Book of Isaiah (“because the knowledge of the Lord will fill the earth as the waters cover the sea”), another metaphor of rebirth, two simple and crazy final minutes, with an almost Christmassy spirit.
It is the perfect closing of an album where the dimensions of the dream, the divine, the fairytale are crossed with an enviable composure and a talent for mixing music and words that has few equals today. It is a great album, but I imagine that this is understood.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
