Album Review: Nick Cave & Warren Ellis – Carnage (Goliath)

Just months after releasing his solo live album, Idiot Prayer, Nick Cave is back, this time with Bad Seed Warren Ellis and an album Cave himself describes as “brutal, but very beautiful”.

So, with Cave passing on assessments of his own work like that, who needs a music journalist?

Well, hopefully I can give some distanced context.

But, really, Nick is on the money with his appraisal of Carnage.

This is an album the seemed to come out of nowhere, being dropped into our various streaming services this past Friday (CDs and Vinyl to follow).

Cave’s previous studio album was 2019’s Ghosteen, a haunting tribute to his late teenage son, which was recorded with The Bad Seeds. It’s a beautiful, very personal piece of work, and it seems that during its making, the collaboration between Cave and Warren Ellis has grown even stronger.

The one new song featured on Idiot Prayer is Euthanasia where Nick writes, “In looking for you, I lost myself”.

On Carnage if feels like Cave has, if not re-found himself, at least conjured up a new, older, wiser and more empathic version of himself. Although, having said that, there are still shards of the old Nick found in songs like White Elephant, in which he rants, “I’ll shoot you in the fucking face”.

And while Cave’s anger is justified, that track in particular wanders off into pretentious poetry, even as he seems to take on the persona of a right-wing wacko who “kneels on the neck of a statue”.

Fortunately, White Elephant is exactly that, the exception, rather than the rule.

The album begins with Hand Of God as Ellis’ pulsing electronic beats and synths make a supple bed for Cave’s sonorous voice.

“I’m going to the river, where the current rushes by, I’m gonna swim to the middle where the water is real high.

As long-time Cave fans known, nothing good ever happens down by the river…just ask Kylie.

Eventually, Hand Of God evolves from a prayer to a love song…”You’re a body of water, flowing across the bed. Gonna swim to the middle, never come up again”. (Swoon)

Hand Of God acts as something of a template for the following 7 songs that comprise Carnage….darkness and light, love and lust, forgiveness and betrayal and a willingness to refer to older songs and bring them into the 21^st century.

On Old Time, Ellis generates a sparking fuse of sound with his electronics and violin while Nick realizes, “We took a wrong turn somewhere”. Then later remembers hearing By The Time I Get To Phoenix on the radio, “Like the old days”.

The title track is full of literary references…Flannery O’Connor is one, while Nick again reviews his own song in the making, “This song is like a rain cloud that keeps circling overhead”.

Thanks, Nick, I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Further on down the line, Shattered Ground is a love song steeped in madness with one of Cave’s best lyrics…”The moon is a girl with the sun in her eyes”.

Finally, there is the heart wrenching Balcony Man, “When everything is ordinary until it is not”.

Yes, the spectre of Cave’s late son is still there, but there is light. “The morning is amazing and so are you”, he croons, but then…”What doesn’t kill you just makes you crazier”.

Lyrics and music that are at once comforting and disturbing.

I’m sure The Bad Seeds will reassemble once the lockdown is over, in the meantime be thankful that Warren and Nick have found a way to continue to work together.

Marty Duda