Nick Cave has spent the last six years in conversation. Through his Red Hand Files Website and his touring Q&A series, the 66-year-old punk-rock icon has waxed poetic with his fans about grief, aging, and forgiveness. And after dropping the Bad Seeds’ last record, the devastating Ghosteen, in 2019, it seems he’s ready to talk about something that’s sadly rare in these times: joy.
On the band’s latest, Wild God Cave plays preacher, congregation, and god over the course of a suite of songs that are in equal measure elegiac and ecstatic. Featuring sweeping strings (in part courtesy of bassist Colin Greenwood and guitarist Luis Almau), spiderweb keys, and Cave’s signature honeyed vocals, the record is an entire ecosystem of sound — and elation. As Cave says in a release, “There is never a master plan when we make a record. The records rather reflect back the emotional state of the writers and musicians who played them. Listening to this, I don’t know, it seems we’re happy.”
As such, there’s a kind of joyful madcap nature to these 10 tracks, careening from more terrestrial visions of nature (the cinematic, soaring opener “Song of the Lake”) to the Mount Olympus-sized title track “Wild God,” a song that sounds like something the titular deity would bellow somewhere wild and weird like the tectonic plates of Iceland. Studded among the washes of choruses and strings and keys, standouts like the single “Frogs” thrum with life as Cave entreats an amphibian to “hop inside my coat” “in the Sunday rain.” It’s a track that tugs at a sort of sweet nostalgia, like remembering the smell of summer in winter.
And then there are the more personal glimpses inside Cave’s skull — like “Joy,” a melancholy yet aching affair shot through with understated piano, space noise, and gentle horns in which “a ghost with giant sneakers” tells him: “We’ve all had too much sorrow/now is the time for joy.” The assumption, of course, is that the ghost is his son Arthur, who died in 2015 and seemingly inspired Cave’s bleak and lovely 2016 album Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen. And for anyone who has lost someone, it’s a reminder that our loved ones wouldn’t want us to wake up every morning “with the blues all around my head,” as Cave sings.
Of course, not every moment can be transcendent — if you cringe at the word “panties” you probably won’t care for the love song “O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)” — but there’s a sense of abandon and play to Wild God that’s infectious. Produced by Cave and long-time collaborator Warren Ellis, the record continues their constant conversation, confidently proclaiming that better times are ahead.
