NEW ALBUMS
NICK CAVE AND WARRENELLIS
Balconies, kingdoms in the sky… Cave and Ellis create widescreen wonder from enforced confinement.
By John Robinson
Carnage
GOLIATH
8/10
Ellis and Cave: journeying into the imagination
JOEL RYAN
C
OMETH the hour, cometh the man – andif there’s anyone who knows a thing or two about carnage it’s Nick Cave. Some of this he’s historically created himself. Some has been cruelly thrust upon him. But whatever the situation, this is someone who doesn’t shy away from what’s happening; who plays the cards as they fall. Now, locked down like the rest of us (maybe not quite like the rest of us – he makes a couple of mentions of a balcony where he vaults into the imagination and back while reading and notating Flannery O’Connor), he presents something like his own lockdown album.
As anyone who has seen his quoteunquote livestream from Alexandra Palace will tell you, however, there are ways of maintaining normality in lockdown (running, working, “booking a slot”) and then there’s Nick Cave’s way of doing them: interior monologue, swoosh of mane, lingering shot of journal containing “the work”. Soit is, in a way, here.