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“By the side of the road is a thing with horns/That steps back into the trees, and a child is born,” he declaims on “Old Time,” whose throbbing bass and slashes of guitar provide some of the album’s purest musical thrills. The story they tell is a version of the one Cave has spent his whole career telling, before and after the tragedy that ruptured his personal life-about our equal capacities for cruelty and love, and the flickering possibility of salvation in a brutal world. But, as is the case with plenty of great films, replay value seems beside the point.Ĭarnage has no plot per se, but its motifs gather force as they pile up and interact, such that listening out of order would do the album a disservice.
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Even for those who enjoy the album, it may be hard to imagine listening particularly often.
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The most memorable part of a given line might be the implied threat beneath the force of this or that syllable, or the anxious way he draws out a particular “uhhh.” If you come to Carnage expecting the conventional virtues of rock or pop, even of Cave’s own earlier work-riffs, tunes, grooves, and so on-you will likely be disappointed. When he’s not delivering outright spoken monologues, he’s sticking to handfuls of close-by notes, relying on inflections of speech rather than melody for expressiveness. 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.Ĭave has always been attuned to the power of artifice and character, but here, more than ever, he is acting as much as singing. 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. It draws from the formal language of modern cinema, concerned less with verses and choruses than images, settings, visceral portrayals of extreme emotional states. But in its most gripping and audacious moments, the album is much wilder than its predecessor. 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. They may have created Carnage as a duo partly out of pandemic necessity, but shedding the band also made good creative sense. As a musician and as a person, where does one go from there?įor Cave and Ellis, the solution was to jettison even more cargo. It was, along with everything else, a pinnacle of his artistry, 40 years in. 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. Cave’s formerly narrative songwriting became impressionistic and autobiographical, sometimes seeming to embody the mysteries of life itself. By 2019’s Ghosteen, there were no drums and few recognizable rock instruments. (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.Ĭarnage 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. 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.
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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.