Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Wild God (2024) Review: Perhaps the most telling moment on Wild God comes about a quarter of an hour in. A track called ‘Joy’ opens in a manner characteristic of Nick Cave’s recent songs: the kind of drifting, serpentine style, beatless and uncoupled from standard verse-chorus structure, that he and chief collaborator Warren Ellis began experimenting with on 2013’s Push the Sky Away. That style came to power the extraordinary sequence of albums that followed: 2016’s harrowing Skeleton Tree; the exploration of loss, grief and redemption that was 2019’s Ghosteen; 2021’s lockdown-mired Carnage. Now, on ‘Joy’, synthesised tones hover and shimmer as Cave strikes a melancholy series of chords on the piano, alongside what sounds like a lowing french horn. He sings of waking in the night, haunted by a voice that turns out to belong to “a ghost in giant sneakers, laughing, stars around his head … a flaming boy”. The obvious assumption to make is that Cave is being visited by his late son, Arthur, whose death in an accidental fall in 2015 – and Cave’s response to it – has informed vast tranches of his subsequent output. Not just music, but 2019’s Q&A format Conversations With Nick Cave tour; Faith, Hope and Carnage, the extended interview with Sean O’Hagan published as an acclaimed book in 2022; and The Red Hand Files, the online newsletter where, as the New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich beautifully put it, he frequently acts as “an unexpected Virgil for anyone mired in grief and casting about for a warm but unsentimental guide”. This time, however, the ghost comes bearing a message: “We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy.” On cue, the mood shifts, a chorus of warm, wordless voices appears and the french horn ascends skywards. The song ends with Cave contemplating the chaos and fury of life in 2024 – “All across the world, they shout out their angry words about the end of love” – but striving for optimism nonetheless: “The stars stand above the Earth, bright triumphant metaphors of love.” Joy feels like Wild God’s mood in miniature. The album’s songs don’t stint on darkness – pain, suffering and death all feature, including the passing of Cave’s former collaborator and partner Anita Lane – but suggest that life can still provide transcendent euphoria despite it all. The song about Lane is called O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is): it’s gorgeously melodic, decorated with abstract smears of vocoder and a telephone recording of Lane giggling as she recalls their dissolute past, and deals in reverie rather than mourning. On Frogs, Cave walks home from church, pausing to look at a frog in the gutter: “leaping to God, amazed of love, amazed of pain, amazed to be back in the water again.” Even if it doesn’t get far, the song seems to suggest, that’s not the point: the point is to keep leaping. — Guardian Track List: 01 - Song of the Lake 02 - Wild God 03 - Frogs 04 - Joy 05 - Final Rescue Attempt 06 - Conversion 07 - Cinnamon Horses 08 - Long Dark Night 09 - O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is) 10 - As the Waters Cover the Sea Media Report: Genre: alternative rock, chamber pop Origin: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia Format: FLAC Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec Bit rate mode: Variable Channel(s): 2 channels Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz Bit depth: 16 bits Compression mode: Lossless Writing library: libFLAC 1.3.0 (UTC 2013-05-26) Note: If you like the music, support the artist