Album reviews: Nick Cave returns with a dark and comforting offering
Nick Cave has just released Carnage.
One of the great surprises of Nick Cave’s late-stage career has been the old warhorse’s willingness to step beyond his somewhat hammy “fallen preacherman” persona and show a more vulnerable side. The results were extraordinary on 2019’s Ghosteen, a meditation on the death in 2015 of his 15-year-old son, Arthur.
Eighteen months later he returns with a project every bit as striking – but one which engages with the wider world during this strange, hushed time. It’s dark, riveting, terrifying and ultimately hugely comforting.
Cave is working with his regular Bad Seeds foil Warren Ellis, whose music folds a barbed wire sense of dangerous unease into Cave’s mannered songwriting. The duo’s previous collaborations outside of the Bad Seeds have taken the form of movie soundtracks. A cinematic sweep likewise infuses Carnage, which feels like the score to an art-house rumination on the end of the world.
Carnage just “fell from the sky” Cage has stated. And there is a powerful sense of he and Ellis wrestling with divine and hellish forces slightly outside their comprehension. “Hand of god, hand of god,” they intone in awe and distress on the opening track.
Elsewhere, songs build cautiously and ominously. “The trees are black and history has dragged us down to our knees,” says Cave, a line that could come from the Bible, a Western or a gothic dirge about Coronavirus. As Cave intones, Ellis’s violin rises from a low murmur to a banshee shriek.
Yet along with the darkness are moments of grace and even optimism. Against a wash of piano, closing number Balcony Man finds Cave singing “Putting on my tap dancing shoes… in the morning sun”. It’s an uncanny image – but a reminder that silliness and freedom and a tap-dancing Nick Cave will return eventually.
There is light at the end of the tunnel and Carnage concludes with Cave gazing straight at it.
Arab Strap were one of the great contradictions of Nineties indie music – a smile-free duo who specialised in poetic despair but whose first breakthrough hit, The First Big Weekend, was an instant dance floor classic.
That push and pull between vocalist Aidan Moffat and instrumentalist Malcolm Middleton continues as they return from a 15 year studio hiatus. “I don’t give a f*** about the past,” says Moffat on opener The Turning Of Our Bones. But later in the track goes a bit 'Born Slippy' as Middleton unleashes a huge wonky groove.
The same dynamic persists throughout an LP that investigates the corrosive effect of internet porn (Another Clockwork Day) and addiction (Here Comes Comus!) even as the music soars and surges.
It’s possibly Arab Strap’s best ever album and, just like Nick Cave’s new record, one to cling to in the weeks and months ahead.
