Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds Declare “Now Is the Time For Joy”

“I don’t believe in an interventionist God…” is the iconic opening line to “Into My Arms”, one of the most recognizable songs in the Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds discography, the first single off of 1997’s The Boatman’s Call. Cave is unafraid to add an unexpected take on God to the familiar “sex, drugs, and rock ‘ n’ roll” refrain. He has often spoken of the impact of the Bible’s stories and imagery—particularly the figure of the suffering Christ—on his penchant for narrative in his songs. On Wild God, the latest release by Cave and the Bad Seeds, these influences and themes are engaged through poetic slant and sweeping musical gestures. Wild God teems with creative ambitions and sacred content. 

Often overlooked in the creation mythology of the Hebrew Bible is the recognition of the ongoing interplay between the forces of chaos and order. Simplistic or secular interpretations make the biblical God anything but wild. But in actuality, the entire ancient text overflows with untamable depth foreshadowed in its first pages as the spirit’s currents sweep over primordial waters. The text reveals a cosmic interaction that is simultaneously a struggle and an intimate dance, an unresolvable, eternal tussle. But, sometimes, illumination occurs. As the ancient text says, “Let there be light.” 

That’s the dynamic tension at the heart of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Wild God. Explicit references to bodies of water bookend the album’s tracks. The title song contains an incantatory appeal for spirits to move upon the waters that both engulf and birth us as we strain for glimpses of light amid the darkness. It’s an album that invites the listener to experience it more than it demands that you understand it.

Wild God sparks with this idea of consequence and spiritual value. But Cave has journeyed through too much to peddle facile platitudes or pronouncements of certainty. His fans know that loss and grief have left their mark on his life (Cave has spoken of the impact of the loss of his father when Nick was nineteen, and Bad Seeds albums The Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen are marked by and speak to the profound grief Nick Cave and his wife Susie endure in the wake of their 15-year-old son’s accidental death in 2015. More recently, Cave has lost his adult son Jethro and grieved his former partner and collaborator, Anita Lane.)   

Within the album’s contents, Nick Cave does not pretend to be a theologian pontificating with authority about the definitive shape of the divine. But, as Wilco reminded us on their album, A Ghost is Born, “Theologians, they don’t know nothing about my soul.” Maybe they don’t. Artists, however,  pursue the soul’s pulse within their chosen medium,  and Cave is deeply involved in soul work in this new album.

 Wild God has little patience for speculation. It’s not that the questions are irrelevant; it’s just that they can’t be settled. But maybe—just maybe—attending to them brings us outside of ourselves into a broader, deeper immersion in the extraordinariness of our ordinary life together. Cave sees music as more generative than a means of passive escape. It allows, he claims, “…us to experience genuine moments of transcendence”. (Faith, Hope and Carnage, p.24). This is the vocation of art, which he sees as genuinely collaborative, especially with its audience. 

In Wild God, this collaborative community reaches more widely than his more recent minimalist albums that were tinged with grief and constrained by the collective trauma of the pandemic. It is a communal call to what the Greeks gestured at with the concept of ekstasis, the root of the English word ecstasy. It is the experience of being lifted outside oneself, a fleeting but authentic slippage of the bonds of finitude: the multiplicity bleeds into a unity, and the boundaries that separate us are rendered permeable. The intimate bond melds flesh to flesh; embrace gives way to ecstatic union.

An exemplary enaction of this artistic dynamic emerges on the album’s sixth track, “Conversion”. Cave as weary cantor weaves an image of a desolate place where an old god “shambled beneath the sodium light” while gathered onlookers in silent observation exude a feeling “worse than grief itself”. Into this bleak landscape, a girl with long dark hair emerges, kneeling “…among the stones and the mystical flare”. As the old god draws her to him, the winds of poetry give way to oceanic swells. It is the artistry of the Bad Seeds that shines here.

Mournful flute notes carry Nick Cave’s ballad at the lower end of the woodwind instrument’s registry. The pronouncement of beauty within the embrace marks a dramatic percussive shift as a drum intro meets a dynamic piano note, a drop that enacts a visceral resonance change. Color and light burst forth in aural form, the choir lifting an anthemic mantra (“Touched by the spirit and touched by the flame”) higher and higher as Cave ad-libs a call and response. The moment’s beauty is overwhelming, and Cave’s exclamations (“You’re beautiful! You’re beautiful!”) give way to ecstatic engulfment.

But this is not conversion as a transaction or submission to dogma. It is consumptive and surprising. It is pyrrhic and immersive, a baptism of both fire and water. It is sensual and raw, a beatific vision of an authentic encounter whose builds and swells border on the orgasmic. 

There is renewal and joy throughout this album that emerges in the midst of, rather than in place of, the suffering and grief endemic to the human experience. Again and again, water and spirit move, touch, and create under Cave’s invitation. 

In “Frogs”, we encounter a “Sunday rain” washing over the image of frogs leaping to God, “amazed of love and amazed of pain”. The amphibious symbols are creatures of both earth and water; mythically, they have been both plagues and symbols of fertility and renewal of the land. There is even what seems to be an off-hand reference to Kris Kristofferson in a dirty shirt that yokes Nick Cave’s song to Kristofferson’s classic narrative ballad of despair, “Sunday Morning Coming Down”. It neither supplants nor counters the previous song, but gestures that surprise emerge even as life forces us into places we would not choose (“Frogmarching us home to a bed made of tears.).

Wild God showcases Nick Cave in full creative collaboration with his band, the Bad Seeds. They trace the interplay of chaos and meaning, gesturing to the surprise of joy and transformation along the way. The mix by David Fridmann attends to the ecstatic pulse of the album as instruments emerge brightly and blur into one another. It makes for a stunning listening experience. 

The surprise of the divine permeates Wild God, even in its absence (“Long Dark Night”), but especially in the miracle of human connection (“Final Rescue Attempt”). In one of the more intimate moments of the record, “O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)”, Cave includes what appears to be a saved voicemail from the late Anita Lane, to whom the song is dedicated. In the message, she recalls, “We tried to write a contract of love, but we only got as far as doing the border. There was [sic] never any words in it, which I thought said more than anything else.” 

For nearly five decades, musician Nick Cave has been traversing the liminal space where chaos, order, beauty, and destruction merge. On Wild God, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds trace a border of words and music that form a vulnerable, invitational space in which we are all invited to collaborate, commune, and be amazed by love and pain, those mysterious contexts in which we live, move, and have our being. 

Wild God is a profound and provocative addition to the substantial Cave canon. It is an audacious, reaching record. It may just be the masterpiece of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ remarkable career.