Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds’ 18th studio album is their first in five years following 2019’s Ghosteen.
The title track references Jubilee Street from the band’s 2013 album Push The Sky Away, Cave manages to take a tale of horror and turn it into one of sublime beauty and redemption, picking up where that song left off.
With Cave, we are never too far from another violent story often from the Bible. It’s during Frogs that he references Kris Kristofferson’s Sunday Morning Coming Down, he sings of that same low-down and empty place where a spiritual conversation has space to move.
At the same time, Cave captures a great truth through simple lines such as “woke up this morning with the blues” on Joy by the end of the track he asks for “mercy”, and with that comes a sense of energy and a swirling release. The day has not ended as it began.
Nick Cave remains a collection of ideas; essential for any rock star. He still looks and sounds like a vampire with his silk-black hair slicked back into his skull. The elegantly tailored clothes and tall frame make him stand out in the arena rock circuit. It’s clear the divine faith he has wrested with all his life has grown deeper, a vampire with a deep longing for God is an interesting proposition.
On Conversion, Cave summons an epic blast of colourful energy while singing of being “touched by the flame”. The brittle Cinnamon Horses leans towards late-period Leonard Cohen, he creates a gothic sweep of cinematic imagery featuring horses, castle ruins and a dozen white vampires under a strawberry moon.
The recent single Long Dark Night begins like a classic country-tinged confessional and is inspired by 16th-century mystic St John of the Cross and his poem The Dark Night of the Soul, as Cave suggested it is “one of the greatest and most powerful poems of conversion ever written”. O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is) includes the voice of the late Anita Lane, a former love, lifelong friend and member of the Bad Seeds. It’s a poignant tribute just before the album’s closer As The Waters Cover The Sea, a gospel hymn that can’t fail to impact the listener. In the face of so much loss, Cave is at peace with the struggle.
