Young eldritch junkie Nick Cave would have struggled to predict his maturity as a font of wry and sacred wisdom, or the fathomless loss he reckoned with en route.
Wild God followed the harrowed Skeleton Tree and grief-illumined Ghosteen, necessary steps towards the new album’s explosion of hope. The Bad Seeds returned in full, though compressed by Dave Fridmann’s controversial mix to one more forceful layer among a gospel choir, orchestra and Cave’s ecstatic voice. The sound could seem superficial at cynical first glance, the lyrics uncharacteristically rough, the whole project a bid to secure recent arena promotion. But as well as being a thematically complete and mysterious LP, Wild God was simply made to be played live by the Bad Seeds. Its muscular, ravishing emotion was revealed to me at an early show in Cave’s old stomping ground Berlin, and later at London’s O2 Arena. In Germany, the homage to his late ex-girlfriend and co-writer Anita Lane, “O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)”, was made heartbreakingly intimate by Cave’s dance with footage of its subject, back turned to the crowd to sway with his love as if both were alive and alone. In London, Skeleton Tree’s “I Need You” saw Cave at the piano, big-screen face huge and voice wracked, as he pled for his dead son Arthur, who also received “Bright Horses”, Ghosteen’s shatteringly beautiful prayer to his ascended soul, completing Wild God’s epic context.
My own listening aged 57 has incrementally shifted from the ‘80s teenager who read runes for life from Beatles and Smiths records in the dark, then blasted out fresh Britpop 7-inches to jolt my jobless '90s self into action. Now deepening engagement with the expanding work of enduring, still restless artists means Cave, Einstürzende Neubauten’s aptly titled Rampen (apm – alien pop music), The Jesus And Mary Chain’s reflective buzzsaw roar on Glasgow Eyes and Bob Dylan’s movingly irreducible, 83-year-old flame at the Royal Albert Hall urgently vied with the new wonders of Nelly Klayman-Cohen’s Gothic chamber-music as Rotem Geffen, The Night Is The Night, which frames Anglo-German-Hebrew reveries in swooning orchestrations and static, and Norwegian duo Mari Kvoen Brunvoll & Stein Urheim’s debut with Moskus, Barefoot In Bryophyte, in which inevitably lovely tunes meet toytown industrial skitter and discord resolves into harmonious liberation choruses, matching egoless ambition with child-like discovery. Wherever the energy came from in an often rueful year, pop music still healed and thrilled. As I get older, I’m more grateful.
Three More Essential Albums of 2024:
Rotem Geffen - The Night Is The Night
Mari Kvoen Brunvoll & Stein Urheim with Moskus – Barefoot In Bryophyte
Johnny Blue Skies - Passage Du Desir
Musical Experiences of the Year
Bob Dylan’s second of three nights at the Royal Albert Hall began at a familiarly wilful stutter, only to usher in wondrous realms when he chose. In the last week of a long world tour mostly playing his lockdown release Rough And Rowdy Ways, he hushed his great band for its weird, peerless Frankenstein tale “My Own Version Of You”, beckoning us into his lyric’s shadowy corners singing largely solo at the piano. The audience’s listening presence and roaring support completed the spell. That famous profile leaned over his mic, amused and enthused, his urge to outrun nostalgia and easy acclaim the very same man caught in impatient youth by Timothée Chalamet in the richly atmospheric biopic A Complete Unknown, whose preview screening became a complimentary sequel to the real thing. The Andreas Røysum Ensemble’s explosive, startling mix of fiery jazz, folk and soul at Norway’s Moldejazz festival, which ended with them pied-pipering the crowd outside to continue the dance, and Dream Syndicate leader Steve Wynn’s solo book-plugging show in a pub back room in the Sussex village of Hassocks, unphased by a selective crowd of 15 to send his voice and guitar booming straight into me, were also great. So too the London Film Festival screening of Ellis Park, a documentary on Bad Seed Warren Ellis and the animal sanctuary he supports which testifies to the difficult, holy characters who find their own haven in rock’n’roll.
Track of the Year
“O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)” – Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
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