(2021) Nick Cave & Warren Ellis - CARNAGE
Review:
At 63, Nick Cave’s artistic standing only seems to be growing: the Bad Seeds somehow graduated to playing arenas on the back of 2016’s harrowing Skeleton Tree, their least commercial-sounding album in decades; its follow-up Ghosteen, an extraordinary examination of loss, grief and hope, was among the best-reviewed albums of 2019 credited to Cave and chief musical foil Warren Ellis alone (the pandemic presumably preventing the reconvening of the Bad Seeds), Carnage is less grand than its predecessor – half an hour shorter, devoid of the lengthy epics that dominated its second half – but it follows Ghosteen’s lead musically. Frequently beat-free, it is based around Ellis’s electronics, loops and string arrangements. In its switches between songs with something like a standard verse-chorus structure and more abstract, serpentine material – songs that move, as the title track puts it, “like a raincloud that keeps circling overhead” – you hear the push and pull between the finely crafted structure of Cave’s writing and Ellis’s more freeform approach. But if Ghosteen was an album audibly born out of personal tragedy, Carnage feels more rooted in current events: “When everything is ordinary until it’s not,” as Cave sings on closer Balcony Man. As a writer, Cave has always given good apocalypse, and, perhaps understandably given the last 12 months, so it is here. Mysterious horned figures, a biblical sun and a trembling Earth lurk amid Old Times’ dive-bombing electronic noise, Suicide-ish synth bassline and Bo Diddley rhythm, while White Elephant offers a very 2020 take on lurid end-times fantasy: statues topple, their necks knelt on, the president calls in the army, violent insults are hurled (“if you ever think of coming around here, I’ll shoot you in the fucking face”), everything happens beneath “a great grey cloud of wrath”. Then it resolves into a beautiful, ragged chorus that carries a distinct hint of late-60s Rolling Stones and faint hope of absolution in its lyrics: “There is a kingdom in the sky,” Cave offers, a phrase that crops up more than once on the album, delivered with various degrees of conviction. At other points, Carnage’s view of 2020 is smaller in scale and more prosaic. There are a lot of lovely melodies on the album, but most straightforwardly beautiful song might be Albuquerque, a fabulous evocation of melancholy lockdown yearning that finds a solution in making the most of the human contact you’re permitted: “We won’t get to anywhere anytime this year, unless I dream you there … Unless you take me there.” If it doesn’t feel quite as remarkable as Ghosteen, that tells you more about the previous album than the quality of Carnage: Cave and Ellis’s musical approach is still vividly alive, the dense, constantly shifting sound complementing the richness of Cave’s writing now. At 63, an age when many artists have returned to their past in the hope of rekindling former glories or sparking nostalgia, he feels a very long way away from the figure in Boy on Fire or indeed the horror that fronted the Birthday Party and the early Bad Seeds, neither of whom, you suspect, would have had much truck with Carnage’s themes of love and redemption: a softer view of the world, it’s worth noting, that’s done nothing to blunt the potency of what he does.
Tracklist:
01 - Hand of God
02 - Old Time
03 - Carnage
04 - White Elephant
05 - Albuquerque
06 - Lavender Fields
07 - Shattered Ground
08 - Balcony Man
Media Report:
Genre: alternative rock, chamber pop
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
