Less an album of songs, more a 25-minute series of low-key ambient synth pieces by Ellis over which Cave’s spoken word prayers of reflective, intense, meditative poetry on death, sin, guilt, grief and more. The language, imagery, and metaphor of religion, especially of the Old Testament, has long been an obsessive, running theme in Cave’s work since his Birthday Party days, up to last year’s Carnage album, of which Seven Psalms seems an extension, and also runs in parallel to the 2020 Litanies collaborative album with Nicholas Lens. Ellis’s music lacks pace, or dynamism, though possesses ambience verging on the sinister, and feels designed as mere background for Cave’s words which are spoken with vivid power and potency. On Have Mercy On Me for example: “I have done wrong / A crystal piano plays dreadful in my spleen / A hatred and a desolater's song / Here and there and each part in between. / I have eaten the children and rained fire upon the old / Dashed the newborns dead upon the rocks/ Plagued the cities, thrown families into the cold/ And turned backwards all the advancing clocks.” There’s also an extra dark, unforeseen irony, as while written in 2020, on Such Things Should Never Happen, Cave describes the death of a baby swift falling from its nest. It’s hard not to think of the tragic death of his son Arthur in 2015, but in May this year, he lost another, his eldest son Jethro from an earlier relationship, who had a long history of mental illness. A short, stark, compelling, work that’s more of a niche one for collectors. Out Cave Things.
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