Now more than 30 years into his artistic career, Nick Cave has come a very long way from the tortured young Australian smackhead scrawling biblically-inspired lyrics with a blood-filled syringe on the London Tube. Seemingly happily married to the ex-model mother of two of his four sons, Susie Bick (photographed naked in the spacious bedroom of their Hove home on the cover of this album), he’s opiate-free, relatively wealthy, and hugely respected in the worlds of music, movies and literature. Whatever demons he may once have harboured are presumably well and truly slain. Which begs the question: where to next when you’ve nothing left to prove?
To the South of France and to cyberspace, as it turns out. His 15th studio album with the Bad Seeds – minus guitarist Mick Harvey, who departed in 2009 – was recorded with producer Nick Launay at La Fabrique, a famous recording facility based in a beautiful 200-year-old chateau in Saint-Rémy de Provence, where the walls of the main studio are lined with a priceless collection of classical vinyl.
Despite the luxurious antiquity of the setting, and the fact that the lyrics took form “in a modest notebook with shellac covers,” many of the songs were actually inspired by Cave’s incessant Googling. He’s used text-language to title moody album opener ‘We No Who U R’, and tracks such as ‘We Real Cool’ convey how profoundly significant events, momentary fads and mystically-tinged absurdities become indistinguishable on the internet. “The past is the past and it’s here to stay/ And Wikipedia is heaven/ When you don’t want to remember no more.”
The Bad Seeds are in top form, creating a variety of menacing sonic backdrops to Cave’s inimitable vocals, but also instinctively knowing where and when to let the songs breathe. While in one sense it’s a thoroughly contemporary album (‘Higgs Boson Blues’ namechecks Hannah Montana), the sombre, lilting and darkly gothic mood that pervades throughout is more slow-burningly reminiscent of The Boatman’s Call or Nocturama than his more recent Grinderman offerings or even the last Seeds release, 2008’s scuzzy Dig Lazurus Dig!!!
His lyrics are as humorous, outrageous and memorably vivid as ever. “She was a catch and we were a match,” he sings on ‘Mermaids’, “I was the match that would fire up her snatch.” And on ‘Jubilee Street’, a song about a man helplessly besotted with a London prostitute, he declares, ‘“I got a foetus on a leash.”
Very much a return to foreboding form, this is Cave’s first truly great album of the new millennium. Doesn’t sound like it’ll be his last, either. “And some people say that it is just rock ‘n’ roll,” he intones deeply on the elegiac title track. “Oh, but it gets right down to your soul.”