Touched by the Spirit
On their most exultant album in years, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds wrestle joy from the throes of grief.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Wild God
“To expect too much,” the Southern writer Flannery O’Connor once theorized, “is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.”
Singer, songwriter, and O’Connor devotee Nick Cave has arrived at a place of softness via a more circuitous path. For years he was the snarling poet laureate of menace and malice, before the tragic deaths of two sons broke him open into a bleeding heart of seemingly endless grief. Following a trio of placid, haunted recordings with his long-time band The Bad Seeds— most recently 2019’s Ghosteen, as arresting an album as you’ll ever hear about loss and bereavement— he has come, improbably, to a place of intentional gladness and uplift. “We’ve all had too much sorrow,” goes one of the 10 new songs on Wild God. “Now is the time for joy.”
A father who has buried two sons knows as well as anyone not to expect too much from life, and therefore there is nothing sentimental about the more upbeat emotional palette that Cave presents on Wild God— not even when the sound of the album is deliberately tuned toward good cheer, as is the case on many of the new songs. With its glistening surfaces, sweeping orchestration, and gospel choruses, Wild God aims for elevation and transcendence. When the title song erupts into a sing-along of “bring your spirit down,” it could almost pass for a Hillsong anthem.
Wild God represents a welcome uptick in energy from a band that has spent more than a decade discovering just how quiet and still they can be— though it’s not exactly right to say this is a return to the raucous, ribald energy of their earliest work. Here The Bad Seeds play with vigor but also a light touch, often favoring opulent arrangements that sound more like Burt Bacharach or Scott Walker than the fire and brimstone of Tender Prey and Grinderman. They’ve always been able to conjure firepower, but now more than ever, they are superb summoners of tunefulness and beauty.
Cave sounds most animated when he’s engaging directly with gospel music traditions— as he does on a choir-backed rave-up, aptly titled “Conversion.” The harmony singers lend a soulful swagger not heard on a Bad Seeds record since 2004’s Abattoir Blues, and Cave meets them in full charismatic preacher mode. At the other end of the spectrum, there are plenty of bruised ballads, suggesting that grief’s hangover persists— with its swirl of strings and synths, “Cinnamon Horses” could have fit just fine on Ghosteen, right down to Cave’s bewildered lament: “I told my friends that life was sweet.”
Where once Cave cast himself as a dark and malevolent figure, he has become one of our foremost prophets of empathy and compassion— a personal transformation, from bitterness to softness, that has been wrought at least in part by his experience of shattering grief. Much of Wild God is about bearing witness to that transformation, and Cave characterizes himself less as the conquering hero, more as one emerging from the refiner’s fire. “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful,” O’Connor wrote. The Cave we meet on Wild God sounds like the object of painful, gracious change.
In fact, many of the songs on Wild God find him in repose, visited by various spirits and apparitions— a cloud of witnesses acting as emissaries of grace and catalysts of conversion. In “Long Dark Night,” one of the album’s most winsome pop tunes, Cave lays in bed dreaming of a mysterious white-haired man appearing at the foot of his bed. The spirit warns that a season of grief is coming. While he makes no effort to explain the mystery of human suffering, he does offer the gifts of his presence, his watchfulness, and his consolation.
Perhaps this man is an angel, even God himself— but the spirit conjured by “Joy,” a soulful piano ballad burnished by rich horns, seems to be someone altogether different. Here, a flaming boy in giant sneakers appears to Cave, and it’s hard not to assume this is the same son whose loss was chronicled on the heartwrenching Ghosteen. In one of the album’s most resonant moments, it’s the departed son who tells his father that the season for sorrow has ended.
Cave has increasingly drawn from the rich language of Christianity in recent years, and Wild Gods has its share of biblical allusions. In the Book of Exodus, frogs make a memorable appearance as harbingers of God’s judgment; in the song “Frogs,” they bear witness to the love of God and to the presence of pain. Elsewhere, Cave marries his Christian imagery with a splash of paganism. In “Conversion,” he seems to be camped out at Stonehenge when he experiences a kind of Pentecost: “Touched by the spirit! Touched by the flame!”
Mythology has always shaped Cave’s writing, whether he’s drawing from the legend of Orpheus or the legend of Elvis Presley, and there are several moments on Wild God that communicate via parable, allegory, and allusion. In the mysterious opener “Song of the Lake,” a man spies a beautiful woman bathing. He knows that joining her in the water would cause him to dissolve, yet turning away from her would cause him to evaporate. To move toward someone in loving embrace is a dangerous thing, but to spurn love altogether is just no way to live.
Wild God taps into Cave’s personal mythology, as well. Surely we are supposed to assume that it’s his younger, more sinister self who’s raping and pillaging through the title track, then goes off in search of the girl on Jubilee Street. And then there’s late-album highlight “O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is),” a remembrance of Cave’s former partner Anita Lane. With its whistles and vocoder effects, it’s one of the most playful songs in the Bad Seeds catalog— and its opening line provides the album with its most endearing moment of indecorous humor: “She rises in advance of her panties/ I can confirm that God actually exists.”
It would be easy to characterize Wild God as an album about how to move forward through a season of grief— easy, but not entirely accurate. There’s no how-to about it, no 12 steps or life hacks. In song after song, Cave receives, he is transfigured, he is transformed by grace acting in his life. The album closes with a ravishing benediction called “As the Water Covers the Sea,” which concludes the album on a note of gospel promise: “Peace and good tidings he will bring/ Good tidings to all things.” It’s a bold pronouncement of blessing from a man who’s seen his share of sorrow— and whose joy is anything but soft or sentimental.
My rating: 8.5 out of 10.
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