FILTER ALBUMS
The good shepherd
With his band again roaring at his back, Cave turns toward his future.
By Grayson Haver Currin.
Nick Cave &
The Bad Seeds
Heaven sent: Nick Cave looks for wonder and rapture on Wild God.
★★★★
Wild God
BAD SEED/PIAS. CD/DL/LP
DURING THE last five years, Nick Cave often seemed like a lionhearted shepherd in a time of global upheaval, guarding a flock with psalms and sermons of his own experience and hand.
Four years after the 2015 death of his teenage son, Arthur, Cave wrestled with and stood in his grief on Ghosteen, a masterclass of surreal visions and spiritual tests. Just months later, when the world shared a new extended nightmare of collective loss and suffering, Ghosteen suggested a survival guide that was candid about the madness involved in moving on. So, too, with Carnage, a 2021 pairing with Warren Ellis that expanded the palette of Ghosteen and grappled directly with the world’s tandems of despair and death. And then Faith, Hope And Carnage – a compendium of frank and surprising conversations with Seán O’Hagan – functioned as a manifest of lessons, a kind of self-help guide for existential endurance.