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Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Wild God review – this masterpiece will make you fall back in love with life
Contemplating pain, death and suffering, rock’s former prince of darkness finds euphoria despite it all, on an album of contagious joy and thrilling melody
A track called Joy opens in a manner characteristic of Nick Cave’s recent songs: the kind of drifting, serpentine style, beatless and uncoupled from standard verse-chorus structure, that he and chief collaborator Warren Ellis began experimenting with on 2013’s Push the Sky Away. Not just music, but 2019’s Q&A format Conversations With Nick Cave tour; Faith, Hope and Carnage, the extended interview with Sean O’Hagan published as an acclaimed book in 2022; and The Red Hand Files, the online newsletter where, as the New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich beautifully put it, he frequently acts as “an unexpected Virgil for anyone mired in grief and casting about for a warm but unsentimental guide”. They frequently surge into vast, ecstatic exhalations – there’s a fantastic moment near the end of Song of the Lake, where Thomas Wydler’s drums, which have previously moved things along at a stately, measured pace, suddenly burst into a series of gleeful, clattering rolls.
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