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Punk-turned-prophet Nick Cave often describes music as “sacred”. Performance, for him, is an act of communion with the audience. But Wild God, his 18th album with The Bad Seeds, feels more like a baptism: an ecstatic immersion in the rushing, pooling waters of love and loss that the sexagenarian artist has experienced since the death of his sons Arthur Cave (15) and Jethro Lazenby (31) in 2015 and 2022, respectively.
Across nine swelling, sinking, swirling soundscapes, the album’s imagery plunges listeners into the lakes and seas of a “swimming god” before bringing us up for air to gawp up at the stars (“bright, triumphant metaphors for love”) and then grounding us on a warm Earth where “the country doctor whistles across the meadow” and rocking us to sleep with the muffled piano ballad “As the Waters Cover the Sea”.
Cave has described each song on this record as an individual conversion – one track is titled as such – but you don’t need to subscribe to any religious faith to buy into the transformative power of love that is hymned here.
As a vocalist, Cave has long honed a pacing, praying preacher-man’s style that allows his stories to ramble passionately across the contours of the music. It is put to use once again on “Song of the Lake”: a humble parable of an old man beside the shore, mesmerised by the sight of a woman bathing in the golden light. This transient pleasure leads Cave to allude to his bereavement as he quotes from the nursery rhyme “Humpty Dumpty” (about the egg who fell to his death like Arthur).
The original line runs: “All the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again”, but Cave abandons it halfway through: “Ah, never mind, never mind.” The old man on the shore finds peace, instead, in the inevitability of mortality: “He knew he would dissolve if he followed her [the bather] into the lake/ But also knew that if he remained upon the shore he would, in time, evaporate.” A chorus raise their voices behind him as our hero repeats the consoling refrain of “Never mind” like an “Amen”.
Cave is great at balancing his wordy grandiosity with casual vernacular like this. He’s likewise brilliant at shifting from fiction and metaphor to blunt truth, as on “Joy”, where he flips from a classic blues opening lyric – “I woke up this morning with the blues all around my head” – to the brutal reality of “I felt like someone in my family was dead”. The only lyrically duff moment comes when he clumsily rhymes “panties” with “scanty” on the otherwise lovely shuffle of “O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)”.
Swinging between doubt and faith, Cave picks up the pace with the rockier title track, on which an ailing deity flies through a “dying city like a prehistoric bird” over the brittle bones of a harpsichord effect. “Wild God” soars into triumph as the chorus throw themselves into a jubilant refrain. The collective crescendo, though, is soon washed away by the more intimate, fluidly bowed rains of “Frogs”, on which the titular amphibians are pictured “jumping in the gutters/ Amazed of love/ Amazed of pain/ Amazed to be back in the water again/ In the Sunday rain”. Close your eyes and you can see the splayed, wet-webbed feet and the slick giddy leaps. Later in his holy bestiary, Cave invokes rabbits on “Joy” and “Cinnamon Horses”.
Many people find Cave’s recent output too ambient and rambling – the songs lacking traditional hooks and structure. This album doesn’t try to win over any of those doubters. In three “Making of Wild God” videos on YouTube, the band are seen joking about writing “yoga music” – but the films, shot live at the spacious Miraval studios in the south of France, help make clear the big-hearted humanity they pour into their music. Cave stalks about in black and white like a pipe cleaner, while co-producer Warren Ellis chuckles into his wizard’s beard as they search for the moments of spontaneity that spark these songs into life.
Throughout Wild God, the rattling fire of Thomas Wydler’s drums and the rolling undertow of Martyn Casey’s bass keep up the heat beneath the gracefully meandering, melodic arcs of Cave’s piano, Ellis’s violin, synths, flute and loops, Jim Sclavounos’s spine-tinglingly resonant vibraphone, and George Vjestica’s tender guitar. Melodies flood through the music and then disappear like currents. Wild God can feel fathomless, but it leaves you buoyant.
