Just a month ago, when I was reviewing the latest album Mick Harvey (read here!), I allowed myself to state that this musician, who played in the Bad Seeds from 1983 to 2009, is currently in better shape than Nick Cavewhich is somewhere around “Nocturama” and others fell into such a trap of narcissism and exaltation that contact with any album of the band recorded after “No More Shall We Part” was more of an effort than a pleasure for me, and the fact that in place of the apocalyptic preacher there sat a TV pastor who stubbornly forced the audience to listen to his idiosyncrasies made my stomach turn.
Bad Seedslike all of Cave’s other projects, were simply boring. They forced the listener to constantly grapple not with the cool stories they once had, but with the contents of Cave’s mind itself, which, if possible, was a feat as tiring as Olympic training.
And then the crisis came, I have to speak up. Not that I “Wild God” the aforementioned pastor-composer disappeared. He will probably stay with us forever, but in the end some of the exaltation has disappeared (the inglorious exception here is the excessively prolonged, monstrous “Joy”), and there was room for compact, well-written songs, such as “Song of the Lake” or even “Final Rescue Attempt”. In the end, the emotional message oscillating between hope and its absence, love and loss is clearer – or perhaps: less murky. It is hard not to attribute this fact to the incredibly tragic circumstances of the deaths of Cave’s sons: Arthur (died in 2015, at the age of 15) and Jethro Lazenby (2002 and 31 respectively), as well as to the age of the artist himself (Cave turns 67 this month). The evidence is there, by the way.
In the aforementioned “Song of the Lake,” Cave quotes a nursery rhyme about an egg called Humpty Dumpty that fell off a wall and “not all the king’s horses nor all his subjects could glue Humpty back together.” Remember the circumstances of Arthur’s death? Cave’s lyrical subject, watching her bathe in golden light, breaks off the quote after the horses, as if to express… coming to terms with the loss he’s been drowning in for most of the past decade.
However unfortunate the circumstances of the creation of previous albums, as well as documentaries and several soundtracks, “Wild God” contains the best material that Cave has recorded in years, and it is hard to shake the impression that the album is a kind of sacrament, a kind of rite of passage, a kind of baptism, thanks to which the musician returns, if not to an outstanding artistic path, then at least begins to catch up with the platform again. And of course, there will also be less successful numbers, such as the aforementioned “Joy” or the album’s closing track “Oh wow Oh wow”but on a recent cave scale it is still a very nice and promising change for the future. And proof that even after the darkest night – both in life and art – somewhere through the clouds you can finally see the desired rays of light.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds “Wild God”, Mystic