FEATURE:
From Bad Seeds Grow Beautiful Blooms
Has Any Other Artist Achieved the Same Consistency as the Nick Cave-Led Band?
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SOMETHING occurred to me…
IN THIS PHOTO: Bruce Springsteen photographed in July 2023/PHOTO CREDIT: Sergione Infuso/Corbis via Getty Images
when I saw a review for Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ new album, Wild God. Of course, when we look at reviews, we have to understand they are subjective. There are albums that get all positive reviews so you have to trust that wisdom of crowds. The collective acclaim. There are some that get mixed reviews. When it comes to Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ career, they have been going since 1984. That was when their debut album, From Her to Eternity, came out. Wild God comes out on 30th August. It is the band’s eighteenth album. Not only is that amount of albums impressive on its own. It is the consistency which is particularly stunning. Even if you have this niche sound and hit gold at the start, there is no guarantee that critics will love the same sound further down the line. Those artists that get acclaim consistently through the years always reinvent and move forward. There are not that many acts who have released eighteen albums. Any that do have a few blips. It is only natural. Think about an artist like Paul McCartney and his solo career. He has released eighteen studio albums. There have been those that received mixed reviews. Maybe his highs are better and more important than Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’. And he was a Beatle! asked on Twitter who could match the band and I got a suggestion of Pet Shop Boys. At fifteen albums, they have released fewer than Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and their Metacritic average – a collection of reviews averaged to get a score out of 100 – is a bit lower. I would imagine Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds to be in the 80s at least. Someone else suggests Bruce Springsteen as a challenger. Twenty-one albums in, there have been a lot of classics. Maybe three of his albums have not scored brilliant reviews. Another few have got mostly acclaim and a few mixed. If we add it all together, then he might be the closest to matching Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ scores/average - though you feel Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds will enjoy a better run in the next five or ten years.
There are a lot of questions and considerations. As I say, reviews are subjective. I am not a big Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds fan, and I would say I prefer the body of work from Madonna, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Kate Bush – obviously – and other artists who have had long careers and released multiple albums. One has to respect a career without a bad album. One might say that the band has a brief period where they were not at their best. Think about 2001’s No More Shall We Pass and its follow-up, Nocturama. Neither of them bad albums, though the reviews were a little less than universally positive. Even so, the band followed up with 2004’s Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus. That was a triumphant return to form. Some artists would tire and might have had this longer spell of average work. Think about all the greats who have spanned multiple decades and it always happens. There is no telling how long Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds will endure I suspect quite a few more years with the potential for multiple albums. I want to come to that review from The Guardian of Wild God and some things that were observed:
“The album’s songs don’t stint on darkness – pain, suffering and death all feature, including the passing of Cave’s former collaborator and partner Anita Lane – but suggest that life can still provide transcendent euphoria despite it all. The song about Lane is called O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is): it’s gorgeously melodic, decorated with abstract smears of vocoder and a telephone recording of Lane giggling as she recalls their dissolute past, and deals in reverie rather than mourning. On Frogs, Cave walks home from church, pausing to look at a frog in the gutter: “leaping to God, amazed of love, amazed of pain, amazed to be back in the water again.” Even if it doesn’t get far, the song seems to suggest, that’s not the point: the point is to keep leaping.
The music follows suit. Cave has reconvened the Bad Seeds – who seemed a little surplus to requirements among Ghosteen’s beatless drifts and who didn’t appear at all on Carnage, an album credited to Cave and Ellis alone. Wild God deftly melds the meditative, flowing sound of its immediate predecessors with the band’s trademark muscularity (one of the enduring mysteries of Cave’s career is how a band that’s seen something like 23 different musicians pass through its ranks over the years, always sounds like the Bad Seeds regardless). The result is a set of songs that feel simultaneously airy and teeming, not least with a preponderance of glowing melodies. They frequently surge into vast, ecstatic exhalations – there’s a fantastic moment near the end of Song of the Lake, where Thomas Wydler’s drums, which have previously moved things along at a stately, measured pace, suddenly burst into a series of gleeful, clattering rolls. Or the mood flips completely: Conversion initially sounds haunted and stark, before exploding into life midway through in a mass of voices singing and chanting, Cave’s extemporised vocal sounding increasingly rapturous over the top.
The title track, meanwhile, is similarly joyful, although lyrically oblique. One way you could read it is as a sardonic self-portrait, rock’s former Prince of Darkness in his late 60s (“It was rape and pillage in the retirement village”), grappling with the dramatic shift in perception that Cave has undergone over the last decade as it builds to an explosive, cathartic climax, bolstered by choir and orchestra. Said climax seems to reaffirm his faith in the transformative power of music and communality: “If you’re feeling lonely and if you’re feeling blue, and if you just don’t know what to do,” he cries, “bring your spirit down!”
If that’s indeed what that song is saying, the point is underlined by the album as a whole. Packed with remarkable songs, its mood of what you might call radical optimism is potent and contagious. You leave it feeling better than you did previously: an improving experience, in the best sense of the phrase”.
Rather than this being a casual observation of such a positive review for a band who keep on getting them, I have been thinking about that sense of longevity and what makes a band like Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds an exception to a rule. What is it about their songwriting and albums that means they continue to wow critics. It is not a case of them not selling. They are a massive commercial success too. They bring in new fans but hang on to their existing ones. Each album offers something new. There is definitely something in their discography that is rare. Almost unique. I am trying to think of another artist who has released eighteen or more albums and maybe only had two of them score anything less than universal acclaim. It is hard to think of anyone else. Is it possible in a modern music scene to establish that sort of acclaim and solidity?! To have your albums constantly reach new levels of excellence. I guess some might say Taylor Swift could match that. She is in her thirties still and her debut album came out in 2006. A career half as long as a band like Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, she could go for a couple more decades and achieve something almost impossible. I don’t think that even a modern megastar like Swift could keep that record. That run of wonderful albums. Maybe a band like Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds have a sound that is distinctly away from the mainstream. It is not beyond the realms of plausibility that an artist could build a charge and really stands alongside Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. In a modern climate – with so much competition and many artists taking big risks and sometimes falling short -, is there any way we could see this golden run?! I am not sure. I was reflecting on the latest work from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and how it will like scoop many more five-star reviews. Their past three or four albums definitely have. What next for them?! Probably sticking close to the sound of Wild God, I do feel they are going to keep on grabbing the hearts of critics. Forty years after their debut and eighteen albums-deep, this is a body of work almost unmatched in music history. It is exciting what comes next for…
THE Australian legends.