"A brutal but very beautiful record nested in a communal catastrophe, is how Nick Cave describes this Covid-19 lockdown-inspired release with his longtime Bad Seed collaborator, and so it is. The eight tracks variously ponder upon death, frustration, anger and meditation, made, as Ellis describes, in “an accelerated process of intense creativity," where "the eight songs were there in one form or another within the first two and a half days.” While some reviewers may have responded to this as a novelty release as a duo rather than as a solo Cave or Bad Seeds record, the pair seem symbiotically inseparable, and have made many albums under their two names before, notably as soundtracks to several films and TV shows, including Wind River, War Machine, The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, and perhaps most in parallel to this one, The Road.
Carnage then has a cinematic quality, often slow and meditative, but also with burst of agitated violin or ethereal choirs and is studded with memorable lines, sometimes inverting phrases such as that of Nietzsche with “What doesn’t kill you just makes you crazier.” on Balcony Man. The title track, as well as Old Time have a variety all the above musical elements, particularly coming from Ellis’s soundtrack experience. White Elephant, among the most memorable and visceral, is an angry extended metaphor that uses a variety of strange images, featuring ice, salt, and a gun that sprays out elephant tears by a narrator who threatens to “shoot you in the fuckin’ face”, and the almost absurd “Botticelli’s Venus with a penis riding an enormous scalloped fan”. The grief from the death of Cave’s son Arthur still echoes after the 2018 album Ghosteen, and Old Testament and images such as “the kingdom in the sky” reoccur, particularly in Hand of God. An album for lockdown, fear, and frustration, sometimes a lingering indulgence, but above all one of profundity and beauty. Out on Goliath/AWAL.
Feel free to also check out our favourite albums of 2020 here:
Fiona Apple to Lianne La Havas to Yves Tumor: favourite albums of 2020 – Part 1
Agnes Obel to Bob Dylan, Phoebe Bridgers to Sault: favourite albums of 2020 – Part 2
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