Nick Cave sings, “This song is like a rain cloud that keeps circling overhead,” and then pauses before delivering the next line: “Here it comes around again.” This is “Carnage,” from the album of the same name, the first release credited to the duo of Cave and his longtime Bad Seeds bandmate Warren Ellis, aside from their prolific output of film scores. Just before observing the impending storm in his own music, Cave has been sitting on a balcony, perhaps outside a hotel room where a woman sprawls lazily across the bed. (We’ll find him back there later.) The balcony is one of many motifs that recur and refract across Carnage: some bags thrown in the back of a car, a Glen Campbell song, strange creatures by the side of the road, and above all, “that kingdom in the sky.” Together, these repetitions contribute to the sense that the album is less a collection of discrete songs than one long rumination in eight stages—or a circling rain cloud, coming around and around again.
Carnage comes after a remarkable trilogy of Bad Seeds releases, in which Cave and his band—among the fiercest animals in rock’n’roll, when they want to be—approached total stillness. By 2019’s Ghosteen, there were no drums and few recognizable rock instruments. Cave’s formerly narrative songwriting became impressionistic and autobiographical, sometimes seeming to embody the mysteries of life itself. Over crystalline loops of electronics and piano, he reckoned in piercing detail with the death of his teenage son Arthur in 2015, and his own search for redemption in the aftermath. It was, along with everything else, a pinnacle of his artistry, 40 years in. As a musician and as a person, where does one go from there?
For Cave and Ellis, the solution was to jettison even more cargo. They may have created Carnage as a duo partly out of pandemic necessity, but shedding the band also made good creative sense. Given the Bad Seeds’ recent trajectory, and the paring down of personnel, you might expect further exploration of Ghosteen’s meditative minimalism, and at times that is essentially what Carnage delivers. But in its most gripping and audacious moments, the album is much wilder than its predecessor. It draws from the formal language of modern cinema, concerned less with verses and choruses than images, settings, visceral portrayals of extreme emotional states. It begins on a smash cut, with a few lines of a stately Boatman’s Call-style piano ballad interrupted by a dissonant swirl of strings or electronics and an insistent mechanical pulse. Mid-lyric, Cave’s measured vocal takes on a note of terror, as if the floor opened under him and he’s tumbling into a bottomless hole of the mind.