Amazed Of Love And Amazed Of Pain

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds released Wild God at the end of August, the eighteenth Bad Seeds album with the main man four decades into a career as the Bad Seed singer. Over the years fifteen different men and women have been Bad Seeds. The original line up- Cave, Blixa Bargeld and Mick Harvey- in some ways bears little relation to the current incarnation, a band with Warren Ellis as Nick's creative foil and Thomas Wydler, Martyn Casey, Jim Sclavunos and George Vjestica (and sometimes Radiohead's Colin Greenwood on bass) doing the rest of the work. But in some ways, the Bad Seeds remain the same- Wild God sounds to me like a Bad Seeds record. 

The previous three Nick Cave albums were all informed by the tragedy of the death of his son Arthur. Skeleton Tree was started before Arthur died but completed after. Ghosteen was written about Arthur (and as Nick says with Arthur alongside him). Carnage was a Cave- Ellis album and although not entirely informed by Arthur he's very much there in many of the songs, not least the stunning Lavender Fields. The sound of those three albums is less 90s Bad Seeds (and the predecessor, Push The Sky Away was moving in that direction) with Warren Ellis' synths and strings and choral backing vocals becoming the core sound, a shift that seemed to be a reaction to events the sombre, confessional, harrowing nature of some of the songs reflected in the spare, synth sound Warren Ellis conjured up. On Wild God there's a move to a different sonic field again- this isn't a return to the chaotic, guitar wrangling, pots and pans noise/ blues of the early Bad Seeds and it's not the full on Grinderman assault either. It's a new Bad Seeds- strings, piano, choirs, foreground basslines. The brittle, sparse Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen music has been replaced by or evolved into a warmer, full, cosmic, optimistic Bad Seeds. It's still a record that is 'about' Arthur - and about Nick's son Jethro who died last year aged 30 and also ex- band mate and former partner Anita Lane who died in 2021 and appears via a phone message in a song about her, O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is). But it's an album about recovery, about choosing joy over sorrow and about living again. 

The album bursts into life with the opening song, Song Of The Lake, a massive ascending orchestral sound and Nick speaking about an old man on the shore of the lake, looking at a moment worth saving. Nick starts various lines and then pulls away with the phrase, 'never mind, never mind', choosing, I don't know, the moment, life, love... The bassline thumps away and the drums rattle and then the choir swells in again.

It's followed by two singles- the title track and Frogs. I've posted about both before. Both have grown and grown since their release. I don't think Nick's written a better song than Frogs- it's a career high and the album's centre, a psychedelic Scott Walker pop song, with Cain and Abel, walking home in the rain on Sunday, the frogs jumping for joy from the gutter, and Kris Kristofferson 'Walking by kicking a can/ In a shirt he hasn't washed for years'. It's extraordinary. I can't fully explain it and don't really need to. It's how it makes me feel that's important. 

Frogs is followed by Joy, a song that took my breath away the first time I heard it. In Joy as piano plays and an ambient noise floats around and a lone horn pipes up, Nick sings in a quavering voice, 'I woke up this morning with a blues all around my head/ It felt like someone in my family is dead', and then he picks up and moves on, describing a nighttime visitation by a teenage boy, 'a ghost in giant sneakers, laughing, stars around his head'. Nick doesn't name the ghost as Arthur- that's for us to do. Then 'the flaming boy' sits on Nick's bed, and says, 'We've all had too much sorrow/ Now is the time for joy'. The song flows on, horns and a swelling bed of music, Nick on top singing of people all over the world shouting angry words, and then of mercy, love and joy. Around him a choir ahh ahh ahhs. 

Wild God doesn't let up, the ten songs an emotional hit one after the other, the music sounding wide screen and epic in parts, intimate in others and Nick making some kind of sense of the world as it is now for him- Final Rescue Attempt has someone (his wife Suzie presumably) coming for him. 'After that nothing really hurt again', he sings. 

Side Two (and this feels like a two sides of vinyl, forty minutes and ten song long album of the kind from before CDs and streaming) launches with Conversion is dark, cinematic gospel. Cinnamon Horses is another standout, a string- laden meditation on love, Nick concluding, 'I told my friends that life was sweet/ That love would endure if it could'. He has spoken and written about about moving on with grief and consciously choosing to be happy. This is a recurring theme on Wild God- life is for living, we carry the dead with us but have to make the most of what's around us and that the real essentials, the things that keep us alive are love, family, friends, moments. 

Long Dark Night is a Cave piano ballad that was the final pre- album single and works much better as a part of the album than it did on its own. O Wow O Wow is beautiful and bouyant, a tribute to Anita Lane that ends with her voice chattering away in a phone message, talking about when they lived in a place near Brixton prison, laughing and remembering about 'mucking around and making up songs'. The album ends with a short song, As The Waters Cover The Sea, a song which is over and done with in two minutes, a musical box melody and strings, soft and either about his wife Suzie or maybe his Christianity, and suddenly joined by the choir again- and as it finishes my main response is to flip the disc over and go back to the start, to go on Nick's journey out of pain and into a beatific state again. 

It won't surprise you that much of this resonates with me strongly. Since Isaac's death in November 2021 Nick's songs, his words at The Red Hand Files and in his book Carnage, have been a help to me. The songs on Wild God are something else- they don't necessarily mirror me or where I am but they strike me, I recognise them, I feel them. In the end, with music, maybe that's the main thing- what it does to you, what makes you feel.