Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds – Wild God: Review

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Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds’ new album is a collection that brims with purpose and confidence.

Recently, the 30th anniversary of Jeff Buckley’s debut album Grace was marked, a record of such promise and beauty that his accidental death by drowning three years later still even now ensures it a Nick Drake style half-life.

Whilst Buckley’s was an accident Nick Cave, for the best part of two decades, seemed hell bent on his own destruction; addicted to hard drugs and often angry and confrontational in person. Whilst upsetting ,reading his obituary would not at that point have been a surprise.

It would be foolish however to maintain that he survived only to live a life free of pain, particularly as a result of the death of his teenage son Arthur in 2015, a period of grief captured in the documentary One More Time With Feeling and on the album Ghosteen four years later.

Perhaps more remarkably, Cave has in his later years become renowned for thoughtful and articulate dialogue with the world via the Red Hand Files, whilst The Bad Seeds are now legitimately an arena sized act after decades of shape shifting. Were this being read say in the early 90s, it would be dismissed as a work of fantasy.

Divine intervention or not, Wild God is the first Seeds album since Ghosteen (Cave has continued to write, direct and released Carnage with Warren Ellis in 2021), features Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood contributing bass parts and is, in the singer’s words, ‘a more extrovert, band forward record’, than its predecessor, which was largely a Cave-Ellis affair.

Whilst those unfamiliar with Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds might see the term extrovert as an unlikely metaphor, it’s a collection that brims with purpose and confidence.

Opener Song Of The Lake is epic, with a choir and orchestration and a grand, oratory feel to the words. ‘Never mind, never mind’, Cave intones, sounding world weary but fuelled by dignity and perseverance.

The Wild God of the title seems concerned with more earthly things (‘It was rape and pillage/In the retirement village’), but it ascends by levels from a grounded piano start to the full heavenly treatment by the end. However this deity is supposed to feel, there’s no question of them going quietly.

Discussing the album, Nick Cave mused on why it sounded, ‘Joyful, when almost everyone on it was dead’. He’s since refused to elaborate, but hauntings don’t come any more obvious than on Long Dark Night where he’s possessed by the spirit of Johnny Cash, whilst O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is) forms a partially vocoded tribute to former Bad Seed Anita Lane, who passed away in 2021.

For want of a better word, the proceedings here sound energised, the twinkling piano line of Frogs and its redemptory plea for the subject to, ‘take that gun out of your hand’, awash with biblical references, an Old Testament blues, the kind of which few except a Bad Seeds record can pitch with a straight face.

There’s just too much love in the world these days for them to falter, however and if wishing a stranger happiness even when you have no idea how that would be fulfilled is even valid, then on Joy it appears that some form at least of closure is there, the nervous, hopeful prose spilling out to baby gentle brass and tender strings.

Nick Cave’s humanity is why, even if he wanted to, he can no longer push people away; reluctantly maybe he’s now chosen the reverse. Changes of course like that will define you and Wild God is clearly part of a process, one that may end tomorrow or never.

He’s still here to tell his tales though, and for that we should all be profoundly grateful.

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