A to Z

NICK CAVE AND WARREN ELLIS

Carnage GOLIATH

8/10

Balconies, kingdoms in the sky… Cave and Ellis create widescreen wonder from enforced confinement. By John Robinson

COMETH the hour, cometh the man – and if there’s anyone who knows a thing or two about carnage it’s Nick Cave. Some of this he’s historically created himself. Some has been cruelly thrust upon him. But whatever the situation, this is someone who doesn’t shy away from what’s happening; who plays the cards as they fall. Now, locked down like the rest of us (maybe not quite like the rest of us – he makes a couple of mentions of a balcony where he vaults into the imagination and back while reading and notating Flannery O’Connor), he presents something like his own lockdown album.

As anyone who has seen his quote-unquote livestream from Alexandra Palace will tell you, however, there are ways of maintaining normality in lockdown (running, working, “booking a slot”) and then there’s Nick Cave’s way of doing them: interior monologue, swoosh of mane, lingering shot of journal containing “the work”. So it is, in a way, here.

Undoubtedly there are a set of circumstances where this might simply have been Cave and Ellis in some version of a garage, banging out a record. There are hints of it on the great “Old Time”, which finds the duo as the doctoral thesis version of Alan Vega and Martin Rev, on a Lynchian road trip, complete with dive-bombing synths and things with horns in the bushes. In his Red Hand Files, Cave has mentioned his disappointment at the postponement of touring plans and how he misses the “recklessness” of the Bad Seeds, and here “Albuquerque” wistfully evokes stasis, while “Carnage” itself suggests if we’re going anywhere anytime soon, it will be a journey in our imagination.

In the meantime, Cave and Ellis employ their own recklessness. The album appears as if it is going to begin in a familiar ballad mode before the mix sucks the piano and violin down into the depths of some sophisticated techno club. Opener “Hand Of God” becomes an extraordinary Bond theme of the mind. It’s Grinderman does Portishead, and Cave is swimming in the deepest part of creativity’s river, at the mercy of its current: “Let the river cast its spell on me…” As the chorus builds to include more voices, it’s tempting to think that this might be some kind of video-conferenced contrivance, families and neighbours lending their voices to a lo-fi project.

As ever, though, there’s slightly more going on behind the scenes. This might not be a Bad Seeds album (although drummer Thomas Wydler is on there), but nor is it one of Cave and Ellis’s minimal excursions into the film soundtrack wilderness. Recorded between late November 2020 and January 2021, there’s a proper team on board here. The two highly accomplished multi-instrumentalists themselves, of course. Then there’s a five-piece choir and a string section.

They are the doctoral thesis version of Alan Vega and Martin Rev

The world provides the rest. Compared with the highly structured Ghosteen (a double album meditation on grief and spirituality, complete with intermission), Carnage is a more concise though no less ordered record. Much as the Bad Seeds’ songs now push into oceanic drift, Cave’s narratives move between worlds fictional and not, the horrific and the consoling. In “White Elephant” he references the Black Lives Matter protests, specifically the Bristol ones, and builds a cumulative image of a boiling world hatred, a suspicious and violent conservatism: “I’ll shoot you in the fucking face/If you think of coming around here”. It’s a piece so toxic that at the end it needs its own hymn of hope to try to heal it in the last few minutes. You’ll find this somewhere between Primal Scream’s “Movin’ On Up” and “All You Need Is Love”, beaming a positive message to the world.

In the beautifully arranged “Lavender Fields”, meanwhile, Cave ponders his own blessed, lavender-tinged place in the creative world (sidebar: some believe Christ to have been anointed with lavender oil), where he now finds himself travelling a “singular road” and doing so “appallingly alone”. Once he was “running with my friends/All of them busy with their pens”. Now (is he perhaps thinking of his ’80s contemporaries Mark E Smith and Shane MacGowan?) he finds himself in a field of one – as others have fallen away, or behind, while he continues the journey. At the end of the song, the “hymn” lyrics are repurposed in a calming Spiritualizedlike coda. “Shattered Ground” is terrifying: imagining the singer literally in pieces, atomised at the end of a relationship, while “Balcony Man” finds the singer flirting with sanity but ultimately consoled by the beauty of the morning and the world.

If nothing else, there is a particular type of business that has thrived in these times – pivoting to online, “making lemonade” from the vile ingredients the world has lately been served. Nick Cave is far too human and empathetic a musician to respond by using them as a pretext for a change of gear into pure experimentation. Instead, he has met them honourably with a great record on its own terms: recognisably himself, aspiring to rise above, much like the rest of us, doing the best he can.

STEVE ALMAAS

Everywhere You’ve Been LONESOME WHIPPOORWILL

8/10

Ex-punk’s sixth solo LP stirs up power-pop, country and more

Steve Almaas co-founded The Suicide Commandos, the Minneapolis punk band that inspired The Replacements, Hüsker Dü and Soul Asylum. Later band Beat Rodeo were early signings to IRS, their bright jangle soon eclipsed by REM. His sixth solo album since Beat Rodeo split in 1988 winningly mixes powerpop, country, rockabilly, western swing and a couple of songs that could have come out of the Brill Building. Dylan’s longtime bassist Tony Garnier guests, alongside Mitch Easter, The Jayhawks’ Gary Louris and guitarists Kenny Vaughan, from Marty Stuart’s Fabulous Superlatives, and Willie Nelson/ Ryan Adams sideman Jon Graboff. Cool stuff. ALLAN JONES

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE

Crestone DOMINO

6/10

First film soundtrack from the Collective’s latest combo

Brian “Geologist” Weitz and Josh “Deakin” Dibb are the newest iteration of Baltimore’s innocent avant-pop alchemists, still more interested in questing experiments than exploiting Merriweather Post Pavilion’s mainstream beachhead. Crestone is an apparent doc about a desert community of “Soundcloud rappers growing weed”, counter-intuitively soundtracked by ambient waterfalls and thick, harp-like keyboard ripples (“Benz’s Dream”), as well as mildly psychedelic harmonium drones hinting at indigenous rites (“Sloppy’s Dream”), lilting guitar and shimmering percussion (“Sand That Moves”). Largely improvised and interspersed with Zen dialogue, a trippy, shifting American dreamtime results. NICK HASTED

SARAH LOUISE

Earth Bow EARTH BOW

8/10

Blooms and blossoms of electronics drift across elemental folk songs. By Jon Dale

“MEDITATION is fundamental because it puts me in touch with my body,” American guitarist and singer-songwriter Sarah Louise reflects when asked about her ‘Earth practices’, “which as an extension of Earth, communicates differently than my thinking mind.” Read one way, this deceptively simple statement hosts an entire universe of potential: the use of meditation and intimate reflection to loosen the shackles of the always-busy mind and open it to the mysterious other; placing a pause upon the hurriedness of our everyday existence; prioritising the knowledges and intuitions of the body over the ideological conceits of society.

Louise’s musical path to this point has been refreshingly direct. She first broke cover last decade, with a, though, where she turned a radical corner, her guitar interfacing with electronics in feverishly creative ways. Tellingly, she seemed to bring the same capacious energies that marked her acoustic guitar sides to her explorations of electronics.