Nick Cave and Warren Ellis - Carnage

The Guardian 0

(Goliath Records Ltd)
Cave’s rich writing and Ellis’s dense sounds form a reliably potent picture of locked-down end-times and the fantasy of redemption

Next month sees the British publication of Mark Mordue’s book Boy on Fire: The Young Nick Cave. It’s a fascinating read, both as an occult history of Australian punk – it’s hard not to like the sound of the Filth, a Sydney quartet whose audition for a major label involved their lead singer repeatedly head-butting a door – and a kind of rake’s progress. It details how a delightful-sounding boy from the country town of Warracknabeal gradually transformed into the horror that turned up in early 80s London fronting the Birthday Party, a band whose aura of violence and malevolence was so pervasive that, says one associate, even the British music press at first gave them a wide berth in the belief they were genuinely evil. Furthermore, the book’s protagonist, or someone who sounds remarkably like him, appears to turn up on the title track of Cave’s latest album, a stately drift of organ, strings and tremolo-heavy guitar topped off with lyrics that sound like tangled memories, first evoking a rural childhood – “a barefoot child” depicted watching the family’s chickens being dispatched – then a bookish, driven adolescence: “Sitting on a balcony reading Flannery O’Connor, with a pencil and a plan.”

Related: Nick Cave's inspiration: pictures and notes from his archive

The Guardian 0

(Goliath/AWAL)
The grief remains, but Cave’s hunger for retribution is back too, heightened at every turn by Ellis’s strings, on this wild, writerly masterpiece

It’s been some time since a swaggering Nick Cave has threatened his listeners with violence. Cave’s last record, 2019’s Ghosteen, mourned the sudden loss of his teenage son Arthur with a gut-howl of grief and a parade of horses, boats, suns, young children and Buddhist folk tales, all wrapped up in violinist Warren Ellis’s keening sounds.

But midway through this surprise 18th studio album – recorded last year without the majority of the Bad Seeds, but with Ellis as general vibes-bringer – Cave’s protagonist wants to “shoot you in the fuckin’ face”, repeatedly, “just for fun”. These are threats backed up by the skulk of White Elephant’s electronic bassline, the clank of its percussion and Ellis’s ever-tightening garotte of strings.

Any hope of getting through a contemporary Cave album without ugly-crying into your hands is not to be

Related: Nick Cave's inspiration: pictures and notes from his archive