The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

Nick Cave, 'Carnage': another great album

2021-02-27T02:16:30.024Z


The Australian runs through all his records in a work recorded with his right hand from recent years, Warren Ellis


Warren Ellis and Nick Cave, collaborators also on 'Carnage'.

The record company presents this

Carnage

as "Nick Cave and Warren Ellis's first studio album working together outside of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds."

But that statement is only relatively true.

Actually, they have signed a dozen soundtracks since 2005.

But yes, this is the first time they have signed an album composed exclusively of songs together.

Eight songs that, according to Ellis in a text sent by the record company, came off the hook: “It was an accelerated process of intense creativity.

All eight songs appeared in one form or another for the first two and a half days and then it was, 'Let's make a record!'

There was nothing too premeditated about it. "

"The album just fell from the sky, it's a gift", adds Cave in the same text.

  • Nick Cave's holy well

Apparently everything was born with the confinement.

With Cave compulsively writing in his home office.

Later he met with Ellis and the music emerged improvising on those texts.

Something similar to what they did with their previous album with The Bad Seeds,

Ghosteen

(2019), except that the result is totally different.

Because listening to

Carnage it is

worth wondering what he has more in common with, if with the cinematographic works with Ellis or with the recent albums of The Bad Seeds.

The answer: neither of them.

We would have to go far back, beyond

Skeleton Tree

(2016), perhaps to

Push the Sky Away

(2013) the first album by The Bad Seeds in which Mick Harvey did not participate, the last original member who held out, apart from Cave himself. .

It was on that album that Ellis, who joined the band in 1993 as a violinist, served as the leader's right hand for the first time.

Cave has always needed an assistant by his side.

A position that the late Roland S. Howard, Mick Harvey and Blixa Bargeld have occupied and that always ended in a huge fight and abandonment or expulsion, but in which Ellis seems to move with ease.

Carnage,

which is published this Friday in digital version and on May 28 in physical format, goes through all the usual records of the Australian singer.

It misleads the beginning with

Hand of God

in which some electronic bases sound with which at times they seem to be playing Radiohead.

But, from there, the rest is familiar.

There are electric litanies, songs performed only on the piano, Leonard Cohen ballads (an increasingly clear reference in Cave), dark lullabies,

gospel

choirs

...

The letters, on the abstract, are full of trees, flowers, rivers, mountains and roads.

There are expressions that are repeated in various themes.

Of course love, that force to which Cave, who has softened over the years (he is already 63), grants a liberating power, but also an unattainable "Kingdom in the sky", a kingdom in the sky that he seems to direct your prayers.

And God, of course.

That distant God who enjoys watching his creatures suffer.

And Cave, who lost a 15-year-old son in 2015 by falling off a cliff, has suffered greatly.

It is a disc of confinement.

“I am the man from the balcony.

/ I am two hundred pounds of packed ice sitting on a chair in the morning sun.

/ Putting on my tap shoes in the morning sun ”, he sings on

Balcony Man,

the song that closes the album.

You can almost feel Cave writing alone, thinking as he paces his office, speaking aloud, watching the news on television.

It seems like another one of those projects in which 2020 has occupied determined that time passes faster after being forced to suspend his tour, the way in which many musicians flee from their ghosts.

Less polished than his usual works, more improvised, with a more homely sound and therefore closer,

Carnage

is another personal album by a musician who always had a theatrical touch, but which seems to be opening up lately.

"I am traveling terribly alone. / By a singular road. / By the lavender fields that reach high, beyond the sky. / People ask me how I have changed. / I say that it is a singular road", sings in

Lavender Fields .

That ambiguous “singular path”, which can mean many different things, is the best description of a mature Nick Cave who continues to deliver great records to us.

Source: elparis

All life articles on 2021-02-27

You may like

Life/Entertain 2024-02-26T05:14:24.925Z

Trends 24h

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.