Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds ‘Wild God’ review: the once dark prince lets the light in

29 August, 2024

Nick Cave

“I don’t know about the music, but these days I feel a more urgent need to connect with people,” Nick Cave told NME when we had an audience with him last year. “There’s a kind of duty in that, that maybe I didn’t feel before.”

That “duty” was hard won. During the sessions for the Bad Seeds’ 2016 album ‘Skeleton Tree’, Cave’s life was side-swept by the tragic death of his teenage son, Arthur, casting a shadow over the record and giving it a much more devastating weight. The dreamlike follow-up ‘Ghosteen’ saw Cave looking for a way out of the fog of his loss, before he and bandmate, best friend and collaborator Warren Ellis took stock of the “catastrophe” of the COVID era’s dark night of the soul on the aptly-named lockdown album ‘Carnage’ in 2021. The following year, the black cloud of loss returned with the death of another son when 30-year-old Jethroe Lazenby died.

Grief hits in different ways. In Cave’s book of intimate conversations with the journalist Seán O’Hagan (Faith, Hope And Carnage), he warned of the act of “calcifying around the absence of the person that you love”. Rather than be bitter and frozen, Cave admits that he’s found a route to be more open to others in the outside world than ever before.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. Credit: Megan Cullen

“I told my friends that life was very sweet,” he offers on the sweeping cinematic prayer of ‘Cinnamon Horses’, the centre-piece of the 18th Bad Seeds album ‘Wild God’. It sees Cave promise “that love would endure if it could” with a peace in his voice and the bliss-kissed melodies that lift the album ever heavenward. These aren’t the songs of a vampire.

Opener ‘Song For The Lake’ carries the lucid dream approach of ‘Ghosteen’ but with the rock core of the Bad Seeds – particularly Jim Sclavunos’ soulful drums – driving it with a very earthly delight. The title track is a joyous waltz cathartically culminating in Cave as the preacher man calling on you “if you’re feeling lonely and if you’re feeling blue, and you just don’t know what to do,” then to join him on this journey of joy and escape.

Highlights come with the candlelit encore-starter of ‘Long Dark Night’ and the utterly gorgeous euphoric trip-hop of ‘O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)’. The latter is to be filed alongside ‘Into My Arms’, ‘The Ship Song’ and ‘Babe You Turn Me On’ alongside Cave’s most masterful love songs, but this time in tribute to his late friend, former partner and bandmate Anita Lane, drawing out her impish ways and ending with a loving voicemail from the singer and muse.

The record nearly took its name from album tracks ‘Joy’ (an intimate piano and soundscape song owed to “bright, triumphant metaphors of love”) and ‘Conversion’ (a fiery testament to life on the other side of being “touched by the spirit and touched by the flame”), but ‘Wild God’ just captures those powerful mysteries that seem to fall from the sky – in all their shapes and sizes.

Bad Seeds records are infamously loaded with gothic doom and gloom. Of course, this ain’t a poptastic LOLfest, and still coloured with the many shades of a life so challenging and weathered. But never has Cave been so freewheelin’ than on the giddy ‘Frogs’, “Jumping for love and the opening sky above” as “Kris Kristofferson walks by kicking a can in a shirt he hasn’t washed for years“. With a lust for life, the once-dark prince is letting the light in.