Album of the Week: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Eighteen albums into the Bad Seeds, Wild God is a shock to the system and it’s wonderful. Nick Cave has emerged from the existentially heavy trilogy that ended with 2019′s Ghosteen with a new appreciation of life. In the time since that last release, he has lost a second son—and apparently learned to manage grief via simple hope applied in a baroque manner. Cave is all in on tracks like “Song of the Lake,” a fleet, majestic composition full to the brim with crisp, crackling drums, orchestral strings and horns, and a lush choir. There is no thinking about anything else when this song is on; it fully occupies all the space. If you’re susceptible, Cave’s repetition of the words “Never mind”—muttered, growled, crooned, bellowed, never bored—is cathartic.

“Frogs” is cosmic: twinkling piano, bright horns, streaking guitar, and a heavenly chorus. Colin Greenwood’s (Radiohead) bass is a solid, amiable anchor as Cave turns to a familiar source of lyrical inspiration, the Old Testament. You might not expect this about a song referencing Cain and Abel, but, Cave has aptly said, “The sheer exuberance of a song like ‘Frogs,’ it just puts a big fucking smile on my face.” This is not to say the grief is gone, only that Cave has learned how to live with it.  Accompanied by low, mournful French horn, he opens “Joy” with the lyrics “I woke up this morning with the blues all around my head/ I felt like someone in my family was dead”—then tells the story of encountering a ghost, a “flaming boy,” who explains, “We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy.” Given permission, the choir comes in like an embrace; for a moment, Cave seems to doubt himself—the instruments drop out and he sounds alone, small, and exposed in the studio. It’s hold-your-breath unnerving, but then the music rushes back around him; relief.

As usual, Cave produced the album with Warren Ellis, with mixing by David Fridmann, a genius at conducting chaos into something beautiful. It’s masterfully done on the title track, which finds Cave at his most theatrical, spinning a yarn about a mythical god who is a prisoner to memory. He bellows, the choir shouts, the music threatens to force its way into every cell, and it’s rapturous. “Conversion,” too, reaches a moment of spiritual hysteria, part of the choir frantically chanting “touched by the spirit” while the other sings it with exaltation and Cave roars “Stop! You’re beautiful!” There are proper, solemn ballads (“Long Dark Night” and “Cinnamon Horses”) and, equipped with vocoder(!), “O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)” is a great love song. A tribute to Cave’s long-ago girlfriend and collaborator Anita Lane, who died in 2021, it’s admiring and affectionate and features a voice message from Lane, happily launching into a “Do you remember…?” tale. There’s just one moment when Cave sings, “how wonderful she was,” past tense, reminding you it’s OK to visit with ghosts.