The first thing you notice about Nick Cave and the The Bad Seeds’ 18th studio album is just how bloody BIG it sounds.
After the knotty, experimental and frankly grief-stricken trilogy of Skeleton Tree, Ghosteen and Carnage, the tethers are off. Wild God is the sound of a band unleashed – with choirs, orchestration – the whole kitchen sink – thrown in.
Cave has gone for broke on this one and the result is epic, grandiose, but above all joyful.
The Bad Seeds’ are back with a vengeance, drummer Thomas Wydler recovering from illness to add a new layer of power to this swirling, tumultuous, behemoth of an album.
As Cave himself says: “It bursts out of the speaker…..there’s no fucking around with this record. When it hits, it hits. It lifts you. It moves you. I love that about it.”
The Australian’s difficult and tragic last decade has been well documented.
Arthur, one of his twin sons with wife Susie, died aged just 15, from a cliff fall in 2015.
Long-serving Bad Seeds’ keyboard player Conway Savage succumbed to a brain tumour just three years later, while the eldest of his four sons Jethro, died aged 31 in 2022.
All that pain naturally took its toll on the singer, but Wild God sees Cave and his band emerging from the darkness.
There’s a strong sense of change, of evolution, in the songs, which are delivered with a vigour, confidence and yes, faith not heard from in a while.
Side project Grinderman aside, it’s arguably Cave’s rockiest album since Warren Ellis took over as his main songwriting collaborator.
It’s also arguably his most religious record to date.
Cave has both confronted and embraced religious tropes and iconography throughout his career, but seldom has the gospel been delivered with such exuberance and glee.
On the aptly titled Joy, he sings of being visited by a “flaming boy”, could it be Arthur? “A ghost in giant sneakers, laughing stars around his head”.
The apparition urges the angst-ridden narrator off his knees “We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy,” the boy says, virtually summing up the whole record in a single line.
Lavish orchestration abounds, along with sumptuous choruses, not least on the title track with its thunderous call to “Bring your spirit down”.
Now well into his 60s Cave also, perhaps, takes a chance to poke fun at his former hellraising image.
“It was rape and pillage in the retirement village.“
There’s day-glo, psychedelic, imagery in Cinnamon Horses as the titular beasts stride through “turpentine trees” and “dance beneath a strawberry moon,” galloping acoustic guitars spurring them along.
That sense of change, of things being worked through, is evident on tracks like Conversion where an old god is transformed by the spirt of “a girl across the street with long dark hair”.
Of course it’s not all hearts and flowers. The world of Wild God is not without its violence, darkness and fury.
The majestic Frogs opens with a brother’s head being crushed by a bone, while the world seethes with angry voices in Joy.
But the overwhelming mood is of positivity, the frogs literally making a leap of faith in the Sunday rain, the Christ-like figure emerging from the tomb bringing “Good tidings to all things” in As The Waters Cover The Sea.
Even opener Song of the Lake is curiously uplifting, its lavish arrangement, belying the world weary narrator, who’s content to let it all go “Never mind, never mind”.
Repetition, the preacher’s friend, is used to great affect on songs like Final Rescue Attempt and Conversion, while choirs of backing singers compound the sense of religious euphoria.
Touchingly, Cave also finds time to pay tribute to another dearly departed former Bad Seed, Anita Lane – the longtime girlfriend with whom he wrote From Her To Eternity.
The song features clips from a phone call between the two, as she chuckles about old times, Cave’s enduring affection made clear in the song’s title O WOW O WOW (How Wonderful She Is).
For the man once known as the Prince of Darkness to uncork such an extravagant hymn to positivity is a typically audacious move.
Wild God may lose Nick Cave some fans, but it will undoubtedly win him many more.
- Wild God is out on August 30 via PIAS records links to purchase here
- Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ UK and European tour kicks off in September full dates
- More about Nick Cave on his official website
