Singing with the heavens

Is Nick Cave a deeply religious man or just an intelligent observer of the Garden of Eden? Is his examination of the Old Testament just a kind of distraction or is it driven by much more complex mechanisms? Finally, is he still a rock star at all, or has he turned into a champion of the nouvelle chanson, rapturously addressing the audience with that heroic sexy croon in ecstasy, like the archetypal sinful renegade, as he adds poignant recitatives to his overwhelming redemption? When you hear his latest album Wild Year, signed for the first time after the masterpiece Ghosteen again as The Bad Seeds, it will be crystal clear to you that Nick Cave is the wild god himself, a timid messiah who spends his whole life haunted around the world, like any other mortal, finding at last simple human joy as the password to the gates of eternity . We are amazed.

He was a wild God searching for
what all old wild Gods are searching for
And he flew through the dying city
like a prehistoric bird

(Nick Cave, Wild Year)

Nick Cave, that quintessential Australian enfant terrible, back in the seventies of the last century, he rocked his home continent with his friends from The Boys Next Door - later The Birthday Party - with a wickedly original vision postpunk, turning himself into perhaps the most significant alternative sonic export of the geographic area better known by the name Down under. A move to London followed immediately after, from which Cave, with the band and his sweetheart Anita Lane, soon ran away headfirst regardless, briefly exiled as "the worst of all children", to finally find creative refuge in the city of Berlin, where, for many similar reasons, once lived and created his great hero David Bowie, recording that unforgettable trilogy there along the way low, Heroes i Lodger, but about that another time...

Why this introduction, notoriously already known?

...

Well, that's why you should pay attention to Lejnova - whose voice literally appears in the track Oh Wow Oh Wow (How Wonderful She Is) on the new record - as well as on Bowie, who is so present in spirit in frogs, Conversion or Cinnamon Horses, with that magnificent Young-era Jack Nietzsche-like arrangement Harvests - therefore, to all those in the multitude of others that we can also follow at the sources of the album Wild Year, released just a few days ago on the PIAS Recordings label.

There's, you know, something on the record Wild Year touchingly film-like Tree of Life Terrence Malick. And yet, such and such a life - which tragically realizes the losses of the most loved ones in the most sensitive hour - nevertheless joyfully breaks through the horrific events of the past like a swollen branch, holding its own family and the whole of humanity together with its thin, renewing faith. And all this thanks to the father who - dignifiedly resisting the despair of a biological loser - wisely reexamines the laws of becoming in himself, in nature and his own fantasy, in order to bind in one place Alice in Wonderland, William Faulkner, Shakespeare and Byron as he wanders the "long and winding road" to the quiet haven of salvation.

Because, yes, this album is quiet. At least some say so. Wondering where the hell that proverbial raunchy rock band called The Bad Seeds was holed up on it? Because this space odyssey by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, carried by the elysian waves of a female choir, is the metaphysical surfing of two trusted friends on an ocean of disembodied mermaids. They relive the agony of Odysseus' voyages fearlessly exposing themselves to perdition, and we hear the ancient phantasmagorical signals mixed in their heads, a frenetic symphony of genealogical trees, addresses of deities from an age when they still dwelt among men, anathematized righteous men, and bursts of live elements witnessing the birth of a planet .

If it is Ghosteen was a lonely place where one's own innocence is rediscovered, and Carnage brutal ancient drama, stripped to the bone, then it is Wild Year the dawn of the creation of the world live, just after the silence. The wild architect worked non-stop making noise and finally saw his work... and there was not a living soul to be seen.

I woke up this morning with the blues all around my head
I felt like someone in my family was dead

(Nick Cave, Joy)

Nick Cave, intoxicated by this strange muse of his later days, on Wild Year he is both young and old, father and child, magnetic seducer and exhausted cursed at the same time. He understands that - if the punishment for his savagery has already passed by him personally, meted out back in his unrestrained youth - it must still find its goal in some parallel version of himself. And while he was only terrified of her as a sword over his head for his entire life - she achieved her terrible purpose. From the moment of that reminiscence, everything on the album becomes Chekhov and Dostoyevsky, the hell of the everyday transcends to a deadly enlightenment, after which it will be shown what kind of material you are made of, whether you perish with the word sizzle or rise in glory. And Nick Cave is no doubt a tough guy.

All right, the only way for this dreamer to deal with the pain of the death of his two young sons, apparently, is to sing with the heavens, miraculously preserved. Searching for answers, he searches for better - what better, the best! - version of himself, he does not curse, he does not repent, he just tries to understand the mysterious apparatus of the Most High. And while you discern the precious echoes of voices in Joy, listening between their folds to the poet's firm confession, all the time you are mercilessly seared by the fire of revelation, that fatal, but much-desired whiff of a complete insight into the functioning of the higher laws of the universe. Guilt of rebellion. Breaking with God. Because Nick Cave certainly had to shout that out to him in one teenage moment we don't serve: "I will not serve". And that's why you can imagine him now on his knees, calling for kindness in the dust and ashes: "I jumped up like a rabbit and fell down to my knees/ I called all around me, said, 'Have mercy on me, please'".

And in that hell of genesis, Nick Cave is both Bowie and Heathcliff and Elvis Presley - and what's more, the Elvis of former lover PJ Harvey from her last year's album I Inside the Old Year Dying. That Elvis from PJ's imagination is simultaneously the specter of a dying soldier and Christ and, of course, the King himself. You'd almost think Harvey and Cave correspond regularly via their albums, all these years after their long-ago split. Total Hurricane Heights, what to say.

And that's why there's a lot of romantic atmosphere on the record Wild Year. All those rebellious passages, shaped by the hot magma of Cave's authorial genius, all those biblical references, all the attempts to erase the former licentiousness through merging with the roots and shoots of all living beings - have a basis in love feelings. Nick Cave may just strike you as a versed preacher whose wild days are long gone, but these lines are still definitely delivered by a passionate man.

He went searching for the girl down on Jubilee Street
But she’d died in a bedsit in 1993
So he flew to the top of the world and looked around
And said, “Where are my people? Where are my people to bring your spirit down?”

(Nick Cave, Wild Year)

Like an aging Bowie, who decided to make an album based on the aesthetics of his extra-sensual ballad cover Wild Is the Wind Dimitrija Tyomkin, which closes the magnificent Station-to-Station from 1976, that's how it is Wild Year. Like exorcising the ghosts of the old Nick Cave, only to encounter a new Nick begging for a little more joy in this life, such is Wild Year. Like an end that resists its ending and never ends, it is like that Wild Year.

The most beautiful thing about the new album from Nick Cave, Warren Ellis and The Bad Seeds - whoever they are today - is the fact that it's completely different from any other Cave record - with its thrilling polyphony, with its grandiose orchestration, with its quoting himself, but so that the blades still sharpen fiercely, with his study of pathos that transcends all known depths of pathos. This different, completely separate in his discography, Wild Year is itself a monument to Cave's impressive artistic and other vitality. To our surprise, Nick is still able to surprise and amaze himself, infinitely extending his life.