album review: 'CARNAGE' by nick cave & warren ellis

I mean, if there’s going to be a new solo review, this is the obvious candidate.

And while that might be true on the surface - my opinions on Nick Cave are extremely well-established, he’s one of the songwriter titans of the modern age who has made multiple albums I’d rank among the best of their respective decades - this is not Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. This is Nick Cave and his long-running collaborator Warren Ellis outside of the band, and the two of them have their own distinctive discography that doesn’t tend to get as much attention. And there’s a reason for that: they’re primarily film scores, starting off with 2005’s The Proposition and then continuing from there - and for the record, they’ve got some real winners here as well, with the general consensus being that his score for 2007’s The Assassination of Jessie James by the Coward Robert Ford is his best and is arguably better than the movie itself! Outside of that, I’ll point to his scores for Lawless and Hell or High Water both being pretty excellent, and by now you should note that the majority of these are Westerns or at least within the feel of the subgenre - the sort of American mythmaking that Cave has always enjoyed dissecting in graphic detail.

Hence, Carnage - an on-the-nose title, to be sure, but away from the Bad Seeds proper, this was Cave and Ellis’ first non-score project together, complete with lyrics, and that left me wondering where the hell this was all going to go. Ellis’ influence on Cave’s compositions has been noted for years now, and maybe the rest of the Bad Seeds weren’t credited because this was composed and produced while in quarantine, but it also had a pretty sharp turnaround time and could well be something leaner, or texturally distinct from what he’s done with the band. So… alright, I wasn’t going to miss this, what did we get from Carnage?

So here’s the funny thing: this is one of those albums where I probably could have gotten away with doing a shorter review in On The Pulse, mostly because this feels not just like the natural extension of what Nick Cave has been doing throughout the 2010s, but also is probably his most accessible album to date - by far one of his most propulsive when it comes grooves if not hooks, but his writing style is also more direct, especially coming off of the grand abstraction of Ghosteen. I will also say that while the more intimate focus might lend credence to some people calling this his ‘quarantine’ album, that’s not really represented in the content or themes, maybe a bit more around the abstract framing, and while there are references to events from 2020, it’s more a backdrop to the very personal arc that Cave is continuing. That said, it reminds me a lot of when Marianas Trench released Phantoms as the comedown from Astoria, a coda to a more expansive, established story, tying up loose ends that we might not have noticed from the previous project but in retrospect were there… but that means I also don’t really put this among Cave’s best work the last decade. It’s pretty damn great, don’t get me wrong, and I can see how some will find more to like with this than his murkier abstraction with Ghosteen and especially Push The Sky Away, to me this doesn’t quite hit those heights.

Now part of this was inevitable - you were never going to get the same bombast without the rest of the Bad Seeds, this is clearly trying to be a leaner project, and I’m sympathetic to Nick Cave trying a more reserved and intimate sound, especially given that he’s leaning into his aged, half-spoken word crooner approach that makes a lot of use out of his haggard, textured delivery… but that’s not quite all he’s doing. And if there’s a production quibble I have that holds back more than a few songs here, it comes with his choice of backing vocals. Not in how they’re processed or mixed, I actually don’t mind the more metallic filters applied on ‘Hand Of God’, but in how the tone is much more willowy and frail - you expect a little more heaviness in selling moments that are to be a bit more ominous or have more dramatic swell, which is exactly what he’s seeking for the second half of ‘White Elephant’ and it just comes across frail and weirdly messy, especially when you have all the bells and sawing strings and especially off how potent the unsettled grit of the groove and ominous swells of strings were. What’s frustrating is that they’re kind of inconsistent from song to song - I think if he had stuck with the backing chorus of women and not his falsetto overdubs he would have had more luck here, but there are definitely moments where the rich strings arrangement and coursing underlying groove and textured percussion and even elements of horns deliver the palette for something more soulful, and it doesn’t quite materialize. The word that keeps coming to mind is fragile - you’re aware of everything that can break across this album, be they the grooves that course and quiver to how that noise rock guitar spikes through ‘Old Time’ without warning, mostly because all of it serves in such stark contrast to some truly beautiful melodies in the piano and strings on the title track, ‘Lavender Fields’, and ‘Albuquerque’. And while I wouldn’t complain if the Bad Seeds added more rough edges, it’s not an album that needs them to maintain momentum or have its own distinctive tone.

That being said, we’re going to straight into the content here, and if you want to go find my reviews of Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen, I highly recommend you do, because this album is the natural extension of where they were going, now with the backdrop of 2020 behind him. The big arc that came off of Ghosteen was Nick Cave doing the difficult duty of repair, not just in restoring his own faith in narrative and art but also realizing his place within it, be they in his relationships with the audience and especially that with his wife after their son’s accidental death. And that feels all the more difficult when you’re isolated and you’re stuck watching the world pass you by with a quicker inevitability, especially as he sees more figures in his life vanish from view, or plans that he may have had fall apart like on ‘Albuquerque’; time was starting to become more of a factor in his storytelling on Ghosteen, but now it is much more prominent in his writing, especially given how soberly he can confront the wrong turns and the mistakes he’s made. This is very interesting because Nick Cave got pegged as making his mid-life crisis albums with Grinderman - and I appreciate the noisy point of reference on ‘Old Time’ - but those projects knew what and where they were and how they could center themselves - here, Nick Cave has rarely sounded this uncertain; on the title track, the reindeer symbolizing himself is paralyzed by time’s passage, not its impact.

And that takes us directly to ‘White Elephant’, which has proven to be one of Cave’s most contentious songs to date, mostly because it’s got very distinct political symbolism and isn’t interested in being direct about where he falls… mostly because he’s casting a wider net with his empathy, which doesn’t make for easy political pigeonholing. He doesn’t give history a pass as he sees statues get toppled or melt in the sun - mostly because he’ll frame himself as one of those figures melting, called back to it on ‘Balcony Man’, and coax his insecurity through paranoid threats that feel intimidating but more pathetic in the face of the coming world; call it sympathy for the devil from a man in his mid-60s, especially one with Cave’s history which is baggage he references multiple times, but you can understand how time’s passage will prompt that insecurity especially as Cave has seen so many in his life slip away. The power of the song comes in very honest framing and recognizing the inevitability, but also in a wider task to find brighter moments amidst human suffering, find just how the meaning of life is to give life meaning; he references reading Flannery O’Connor, whose work was often focused on characters seeking divinity and happiness amidst a miserable world, and given how ‘Hollywood’ on Ghosteen showed him resigned to that world, it’s genuinely powerful to see him looking for more down here. That’s why multiple songs reference him trying and mostly failing to restore things with his wife to what they once were - literally the sex references on the third verse of ‘Hand Of God’ make it clear where he wants to restore the feeling… before becoming resigned to them as something new going forward, even if it means a departure, with the stains of his art showing the change he must accept to find more. And what I find most striking came on ‘Balcony Man’ - he references Fred Astaire, the old song-and-dance men, facing truth in the morning sun just like he did on the end of Skeleton Tree, and just like Father John Misty did at the end of Pure Comedy, highlights the quiet and intimate moments of love that make life worth living. That’s the big reason why I’m calling it a coda to Ghosteen - not only does it build off the themes, it’s the natural conclusion to the haunted state of loss that ended that project.

So to wrap things up, this is Nick Cave accepting not his place to command change, but to fit within it - inflexibility would have been the easy route, but Cave has done the deeply personal work to try and move forward - changed himself, and perhaps a bit crazier for the effort, but no less heartfelt. It doesn’t hit the heights of his 2010s output - to be fair, very few artists could match that trilogy - but for being able to find some vestige of focus going forward and… let’s call it comfort with what the world is becoming, it feels like a step forward, even if there are some patches that don’t connect as sharply as they could. Ergo, this is a solid 8/10 - highly recommended, and given its length and more uptempo moments I can see it being accessible, but it’s also one that heavily benefits from the arc that came before it. And for someone who was concerned where Nick Cave was going to go from here… I’m happy he’s found at least a little internal security in this changing world - it’s going to be a trip to see what comes next.