By John Shand, Robert Moran and Barry Divola
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ Wild God: more love thy neighbour than the fire and brimstone of old.
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Wild God
Perhaps the best line on the new Nick Cave album is this: “We tried to write a contract of love, but we only got as far as doing the border. There were never any words in it. Which I thought said a lot more than anything else.”
Interestingly, it doesn’t come from Cave. It’s his former partner, muse and co-writer, Anita Lane, who died in 2021. We hear a recording of her saying those words in what sounds like a phone message at the end of Oh Wow Oh Wow (How Wonderful She Is), a song Cave wrote in her memory.
Lane is not the only ghost haunting Wild God, the 18th album Cave has recorded with the Bad Seeds.
The recent road-to-Damascus transformation of the 66-year-old has been well-documented of late. He has been speaking openly in interviews about how the death of his 15-year-old son Arthur in 2015 fundamentally changed him, about how he has come to embrace humanity, see the good in people, and connect with his audience in ways he never would have thought possible. This change has been most tangible though his website The Red Hand Files, which he started as a way for people to ask him questions, but has developed into Cave becoming part philosopher, part priest, part agony aunt.
In 2022 he lost another son, Jethro, who was 31. It’s tempting to read these recent tragedies into his songs. Indeed, it’s almost impossible not to envision Arthur in Joy, where Cave sees “a flaming boy in giant sneakers with laughing stars around his head”. The boy has a message for him: “We’ve all had too much sorrow – now is the time for joy.”
Nick Cave, now 66, takes us to church on Wild God.Credit: Ian Allen
If this all sounds a little religious, then you’re not far off the mark. Many of these new songs come with gospel-style choral arrangements: Conversion has an evangelical bent, with the exhortation “Touched by the spirit! Touched by the flame!” ; album closer As the Waters Cover the Sea is nothing short of a hymn, with Cave joining the choir in the words “peace and good tidings to the land”.
Of course, Nick Cave is a man who has long been a reader of the Bible and his work has been inspired by the deities within it. It’s just that as a younger man, with the Birthday Party and a good chunk of the Bad Seeds’ career, he was very much an Old Testament kind of guy, more fire and brimstone than love thy neighbour.
While he hasn’t gone happy-clappy, in these new songs he’s a man who is only too aware of mortality and is searching for the light rather than the darkness. On the title track he casts himself as an old, sick deity who is now only in his prime in his own mind. And in a few songs, salvation comes in the form of a woman. Anyone who has seen the 2016 documentary One More Time With Feeling, or heard Cave in interviews talking about how his wife Susie dealt with the death of their son, will know that his admiration for her is huge.
So when he sings “it was my privilege to walk you home in the Sunday rain” in Frogs, or “my hand searching for your hand searching for my hand” in Final Rescue Attempt, it’s hard not to sense her presence between the lines, or to imagine the two of them clinging to each other to remain upright in the tsunami of grief that followed the loss of their son.
Wild God is being touted as a return to the Bad Seeds’ sound of old. That’s not entirely true. Cave’s writing and the band’s sound became progressively more spectral and fragmented on Skeleton Tree (2016) and Ghosteen (2019), mainly revolving around the core of his partnership with musical foil Warren Ellis, who threw his wild man experimentalism at everything, while Cave matched him with impressionistic lyrical flights of fancy.
The new album retains some of that spirit but is more anchored. Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood provides some characteristically fluid bass lines; Cave’s stately piano playing comes back to the fore; the aforementioned choral arrangements take it back to church.
And just as Cave is seeking more connection with the human race, on Wild God he’s also reaching out to beings both living and on the other side. Barry Divola
Post Malone, F-1 Trillion
By this point, it’s near impossible to dislike Post Malone. A decade since his viral trap breakout White Iverson, the 29-year-old has somehow become pop’s golden retriever, a cuddly, humble presence whose face tattoos, grills and penchant for boozing have lent him the persona of a gentleman outlaw without any of the requisite danger.
For the amount he says he drinks, you’d have expected at least one leaked video of him politely talking back to an overzealous cop – “apologies, my good sir, I understand you’re doing your job, but unhand me now” – and yet nothing.
Instead, from Better Now to Sunflowers to Circles and beyond, he has somehow become a stalwart of pop’s stickiest melodies. In the past year alone he’s been the connecting tissue between pop’s biggest megastars, dropping by for inoffensive cameos on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter (Levii’s Jeans) and Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department (Fortnight).
Posty goes country: F-1 Trillion is easy, breezy arena pop.Credit:
F-1 Trillion, his long-threatened country debut – it was in May 2015, months before White Iverson was even released, that he infamously tweeted: “WHEN I TURN 30 IM BECOMING A COUNTRY/FOLK SINGER” – further highlights how effortlessly he can command any crossover space. While Beyoncé, Zach Bryan and even Morgan Wallen have struggled to win over Nashville’s firmament, last week Posty was on stage at the Grand Ole Opry in a rhinestoned baby-blue suit, sharing the spotlight with local legends Vince Gill and Brad Paisley. The guy knows how to tip his (10-gallon) hat.
Clocking in at 18 songs and 58 minutes, F-1 Trillion is another ingratiating gambit and another bridge, this time between traditional Nashville country and its current pop boom. A rollicking duet with Tim McGraw (Wrong Ones) opens the album, for Christ’s sake, and subsequent tracks feature everyone from Hank Williams Jr (Finer Things), Dolly Parton (Have the Heart) and Chris Stapleton (California Sober) to new-school hitmakers Jelly Roll (Losers), Lainey Wilson (Nosedive) and Luke Combs … twice (Guy for That and Missin’ You Like This).
The album has already produced the globe-conquering number one I Had Some Help with Morgan Wallen (and, ahem, the opening riff of Tom Petty’s Learning to Fly) and the steadily climbing Pour Me a Drink with Blake Shelton, a ridiculously catchy fist-pumper that makes me think Gwen Stefani made an OK choice after all. Goes Without Saying, featuring Brad Paisley, is another sing-along that’ll have you swaying intensely in the kitchen with your head down and tongs up.
Raise your red cups: The 29-year-old’s country pivot is convincingly booze-soaked.Credit: Amy Harris/Invision/AP
For better or worse, this is straight windows-down music, the sort of uncomplicated listening you’d hear on Kix Country, road-trippin’ down the south coast while finger-drumming on the steering wheel. It’s radio music in the old-fashioned sense, when radios didn’t need bluetooth.
There’s none of the intellectual and formal invention that fuelled Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, but show me anyone who was expecting it and I’ll show you a weirdo. More surprisingly, for an artist who segued to country from hip-hop (two genres that, especially in the US, share regional and thematic overlap), there’s not even a hint of the genre-blurring that’s made Morgan Wallen country’s best pop crossover. When Posty goes country, he goes full country.
In a new affectation he sings every song with a trembling vibrato, as if he’s belting in front of a portable fan. It’s not necessarily bad, it’s just odd, as though someone in the studio should’ve handed him a note. Album-closer Yours is classic cornball country, with Posty imagining giving his daughter away to her future husband. His daughter is currently two years old.
If F-1 Trillion marks Post Malone as the Uncle Kracker of his generation, I say that only with affection. Uncle Kracker gifted us Smile, an all-timer that lights up Smooth FM daily, mostly right around school pick-up. What better place for pop’s reigning golden retriever? Robert Moran
Hamed Sadeghi’s Empty Voices: the Iranian-Australian tar player carves out an idiom all his own.
Hamed Sadeghi, Empty Voices
What a shrewd way to draw you in. Hamed Sadeghi begins Empty Voices with a musical supplication, simply entitled Please. Lasting only 2½ minutes, it sets Sadeghi’s ringing tar (a steel-stringed Persian lute) against a simple drone, and yet the sense of entreaty is palpable – as if he’s appealing to you to listen.
By the time the rest of the band quietly enters for the ensuing Taarof, you’re already hooked: drawn into this poetic world Sadeghi has created, in which his tar meditates amid instruments and musicians more usually associated with jazz.
But to call the music a hybrid would be to demean it. It’s more an idiom all of its own: unique in concept and execution. Having unveiled the project at last year’s Sydney Festival, Sadeghi has now refined it, and the results are consistently mesmerising.
The septet includes bassist Lloyd Swanton (of the Necks), with whom Sadeghi is used to playing in the trio Vazesh. But where that project deals exclusively in improvisations, this one is based on the Iranian-Australian’s compositions. Caressing rather than assaulting the ears, these are laced with solos from some of this country’s most distinguished improvisers: saxophonists Sandy Evans and Michael Avgenicos, bass clarinettist Paul Cutlan, trumpeter Thomas Avgenicos and percussionist Adem Yilmaz.
Hamed Sadeghi: The Iranian-Australian tar player carves out an idiom all his own.Credit:
A striking element of their art is the proliferation of air and space. It’s as if all the sounds are transparent, allowing you to hear the instruments through each other. Yet despite everyone being on a tight leash in terms of density and dynamics, there’s no sense of the collective creativity being constrained. Evans’ soprano saxophone still cries in its gull-like way, and Cutlan still produces one of the most haunting sounds you’ll hear on bass clarinet.
Mother Tongue is underpinned by an instantly involving groove that suggests journeying for the delight of journeying, rather than a burning need to reach a destination, with Evans’ soprano spiralling high above the expedition.
For all the prayer-like pensiveness, Sadeghi is too wise a conceptualist not to build dramatic undulations into the album as a whole. Inherited Accidentally develops a rousing refrain, for instance, before dropping away to a sparse, contemplative solo from Yilmaz, full of subtle textural shifts from his cosmopolitan array of instruments.
The use of drones, especially Swanton’s bowed bass, is a recurrent feature and, with part of Sadeghi’s compositional inspiration coming from Sufi mysticism, they deepen the perception of the music being somehow sacred, like so many voices singing in a consecrated place where music is the religion.
This impression reaches its apotheosis on The Joy of Solitude, although, having established this mood, Sadeghi then lets Avgenicos’ trumpet soar briefly, as if reaching up to some vaulted ceiling. The album is rounded out by the surprisingly visceral Bittersweet, the title encapsulating the feeling of reaching the end of a sonic voyage that has been so enthralling. John Shand
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