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Country: Australia
Style: Alternative Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 30 Aug 2024
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My first experience of Nick Cave was oddly not musical, because I first encountered him as an actor giving an uncompromising performance in Ghosts... of the Civil Dead, an obscure Australian prison feature that he also co-wrote. Once I realised he was a musician, I had to check out his music and I was quickly hooked. Murder Ballads is probably my favourite album of his with the Bad Seeds, but on another day I might plump for Let Love In or Your Funeral... My Trial instead. I was firmly paying attention when he put out the very different The Boatman's Call, but I seem to have drifted away since then. I've heard some of his later albums but nothing's grabbed me the way his old stuff did.
So let's check out his new one, Wild God, which is his first album since 2019's Ghosteen, and which apparently features much more input from the Bad Seeds. Cave has continually reinvented what he does throughout his career, so I'm not shocked to find this different to anything that I've heard from him before. However, it's easy to see the evolution. There are plenty of moments here that owe a debt to The Boatman's Call, but the sparseness is gone, if not all the personal ache. What replaces it is a buoyancy that's always there but sometimes makes itself incredibly obvious.
It's there from the outset on Song of the Lake, the busiest song I've heard from Cave in decades. While Wild God is a more personal song, it erupts halfway through and suddenly it's every bit as buoyant as Song of the Lake. Frogs builds into buoyancy. Joy builds into buoyancy. Conversion may build into buoyancy more than anything else here, touching early but exploding into something of such import that it's impossible to not be affected by it. Eventually we realise that the swell is on every song, even when we think it's all calmed down to something more personal. It's like there's an angelic throng hovering above the album accompanying everything with joy.
The key line may be one from Joy, when Cave sings, "We've had too much sorrow. Now is the time for joy." He's always been a tortured poet, tearing apart his soul for the right word on album after album, and this album is no exception. However, every moment of pain is tempered by the vibrant joy in the chorus around him. This is gospel music really, even if it's not worshipping any particular god. It's finding revelation in the act of worship through music. It's weird to realise that this isn't an album of words, not really, even if a few stand out here and there. Cave may be a poet with his own singular voice, but this album is all about mood.
Above everything else, it lives or dies on mood. How did you feel coming into this album? How did you feel leaving it? Crucially, what's the difference between those two states and why? Are there any particular moments that prompted that or was it just the combined effect of three quarters of an hour of grand affirmation? There are moments here of traditional Bad Seeds groove, like in the second half of Cinnamon Horses, but mostly it's just pure emotion transformed into a musical form.
I'm not sure I can even call out highlights because I think I'll need to get to know this album over a much longer period than a day to decide on that. Wild God certainly grabbed me, and Conversion and Joy too, but I wonder if Final Rescue Attempt will end up being the song that actually speaks to me the way Cave songs traditionally tend to do. I have a feeling it might be but I don't know yet. I do know that the song that most people have raved about, O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is) didn't wow me. Maybe it'll manifest its power to me after more listens, but I don't think so. It's an interesting song musically with unusual percussive effects, whistles and a tasty backing vocal, but it's not one that has connected with me yet, especially with the narrative section.
It isn't alone. I like every song here but I don't love every song the way that many people seem to do. I've seen it in a lot of top ten lists for 2024 and it's topped at least one. Even as a Cave fan, I'm just not hearing that level of accomplishment here. It's a good album, certainly, and maybe it's a great one. It does things that I'm not used to hearing from Cave, like focusing on mood over lyrics, and that's interesting. I felt the buoyancy too, which I think is the point, but I'm not going to find a struggle to move on to another album, which is something I've done before with Cave albums. Let me see how it settles.
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