Review Summary: Closer to the secrets of the universe.
“It’s a long way to find peace of mind, peace of mind/And I’m just waiting now for my time to come/And I’m just waiting now for peace to come/For peace to come.”
These were the last words spoken on the Bad Seeds’ 2019 album
Ghosteen, the window into the grieving process particular to parents who lose a child. That monumentally emotionally demanding closer ‘Hollywood’ is not a song I play regularly or lightly; such is the extent to which it bestows the agony of its songwriter upon the listener. A couple of years after I first listened to it, I was at least able to form a left-brained response to the song…
Damn. How on God’s green earth do you follow this up?
‘Hollywood’ feels like a work of finality. It does not sound like something from which you can look back at the camera and cheerfully say, “Alright, and coming up next!” So what could we expect of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ eighteenth studio album
Wild God?
Following the three mediative, synth-structured albums that were a total rejection of the blues, rock and post-punk sounds throw which Cave had made his name, the Bad Seeds have returned to a more familiar sound on
Wild God. There is solid-as-St-Pauls rock with rushing great choirs reminiscent of their 2003 masterwork
Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus. There are even moments where Cave takes to the pulpit and in spoken word assumes the role of the musical priest. As he leads the chorale in the closing hymn ‘As the Waters Cover the Sea’, the Bad Seeds have never sounded like such a gospel line-up.
However, there is nothing in the depictions of God that you would hear in your local church. Cave’s imagery of the Almighty is varied and unusual. Above all, God is human and vulnerable as opposed to omnipotent or wise or vengeful in the songs of
Wild God: He is “dying and crying and singing” on the title track, disoriented and purposeless on ‘Final Rescue Attempt’ and an apparition of the spirit of youth on ‘Joy’. In a startling swerve, ‘O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)’ features a recording of Cave’s friend and collaborator Anita Lane, who died in 2021, depicted as a God of sex in the opening verse.
The natural world is a theme that makes a marked prevalent appearance in
Wild God as the characters within arrive at moments of great revelation or contemplation in the wind and the rain and by great bodies of water. The exuberant ‘Frogs’ was inspired by Cave’s newfound pastime of cold-water swimming and its after-effects that the singer found so revitalising that he compared it to being born again. On ‘Song of the Lake’, Cave from the outset sings, “The light was such that the moment was worth saving” as the narrator is in awe of a sun setting over a lake where a woman is bathing. This is a church in the wild, one of Cave’s imagination but one where he seems that he belongs more than any other depicted in his many previous iterations.
One of the letters in
The Red Hand Files that has really stuck with me was Cave’s response to one of the many fans who, having lost a loved one, ask the Australian for counsel. Cave described those who have endured such a grieving process as having moved “closer to the secrets of the universe”, building a deeper understanding and appreciation for that which we see in this thing called life.
This leads me to what I feel most deeply about
Wild God: it could be a perfect full-stop on the dovetailed story between Nick Cave the artist and Nick Cave the musician. It is his most definite and tailor-made statement on religion and the belief and belonging that it necessitates. It is the work of a man who has made sense of the world after grief that is forever changed in some ways and forever the same in others. It is the happiest album in the Bad Seeds’ canon. After all these years, can you believe that?
Who sat on a narrow bed, this flaming boy/He said, “We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy.”
