Nick Cave & Warren Ellis – Carnage
(Goliath/AWAL)
Reviewed by Tim Gruar.
The great ominous, swaggering Nick Cave has softened over the years. His violent, menacing, brimstone and fire brand has been dampened somewhat. That’s understandable – the last disc, ‘Ghosteen’, was focused on the very sad circumstances and the loss of Arthur, Cave’s teenage son. Gut-wrenching grief, equine trampling, songs with boats, children and ancient tales of Buddhism. All made manifest by Warren Ellis’s keening, eerie violin and the ether-realness of the Bad Seeds. Without a reference point, these songs could have easily have been the soundtrack to a zombie film or a political thriller. They are fluid, and yet archaic.
But you can’t keep Cave down, it seems. The show must go on. Despite the diseased audiences and pandemic legalities. He chose to spend ‘Lockdown’ performing in an empty theatre, hunkering down at Alexandra Palace, to record the wonderful and intimate ‘Idiot Prayer’.
However, earlier this year, without warning he dropped his 18th studio album – laid down last year without most of his usual band – the Bad Seeds – just Ellis. It slipped by most of us and now we are catching up. On ‘Carnage’ Cave is willing to lift himself out of grief, which was omnipresent for most of ‘Ghosteen’ and return to the rage and ravenousness of the earlier creations like ‘Let Love In’ and ‘Murder Ballads’.
You can hear it in the voice of his protagonist on ‘White Elephant’: “I want to shoot you in the fuckin’ face”, he repeats maniacally over and over, “just for fun”. Cave has ripped his inspiration straight out of the front pages. The song is a deep cut, a slash even, across white, privileged America. In the space of four lines he sums up Black Lives Matter and the hysterical over-reaction of the white and privileged; the eradication of Confederate memorabilia; George Floyd and the gun toting McCloskey’s: “The white hunter sits on his porch / With his elephant gun and his tears / He’ll shoot you for free if you come around here/ A protester kneels on the neck of a statue / The statue says, “I can’t breathe” / The protester says, “Now you know how it feels” / And he kicks it into the sea.” The ‘White Elephant’, of course is a symbol in US politics for the Republican party. Very bloody clever, these lyrics. Very clever indeed. Like many of Cave’s ‘rant’ songs, there is a musical threat behind, provided by Ellis and his grungy, electronic bassline, the clank of drumming and a garotte of strings that build up the tension to the point of strangulation.
Cave’s Old Testament persona revels itself early on in “Hand of God”, which is both a plea for calm and a thinly veiled threat of doom. It seems like the perfect companion to some of his maniacal early works like ‘Get Ready For Love’ (from ‘The Lyre of Orpheus’). And there’s more references to the lies the Evangelical church of America tells to keep the ignorant and hardliner Conservatives in lockstep. This is an exhilarating and exhausting, disorienting record of distortion and deconstruction of the modern day Western Society.
There’s a sense of the apocalyptic all over. Like the yearning on a track called ‘Albuquerque’, which speaks about many recent events, but mostly of the loss of freedom to travel and explore due to Covid Lockdowns. “And we won’t get to anywhere/ Anytime this year, darling,” he sighs, reluctantly. Ellis, too was greatly effected by Covid when his work on Wordsworth’s poems, a collaboration with Maryanne Faithful, was brutally cut short when the famous singer caught the disease herself and was hospitalised. Fortunately, she recovered and the project was eventually completed but the incident, no doubt, had a profound affect on Ellis and his music.
Throughout ‘Carnage’ Cave and Ellis return again and again to a cache of catastrophic images and emotion, both wild and vivid, like freshly painted graffiti splashed across a coloniser’s statue in anger and protest. They explore, reincarnate and intern God (the righteous and the forgiver); Guns (to serve and protect and destroy); tears (God’s, yours, mine); Donkeys and Elephants and a host of other political animals; Ice – both melting (as in climate change, and in hearts); and the alt-right (the Q-Anons and Pro-Trump Congress Invaders). Each time the emphasis is altered through a new iteration in time.
The record closes with ‘Balcony Man’. The elements are also remixes of certain core elements: in this case it’s his dancing shoes/Fred Astaire (a frivolous freedom in these Covid repressed times?); and ice (the melting images again); and the morning sun (a new dawning, a new age). Read what you will into these lyrics. I wonder if this is the voice of someone in lockdown debating whether to leave the house and join the world again. A hibernating animal remerging after hiding from the storm, the holocaust, the pandemic. Planning to escape the claustrophobia. And realising its not so bad: ‘What am I to think on this balcony, Fred?/ Where everything is amazing that stays in bed/ I’m a two hundred pound octopus under a sheet / Dancing round your world with my hands and feet/ And this much I know to be true’.
“Escape is on her mind again”, Neil Finn once wrote. More than once Cave’s characters yearn to throw their bags into the trunk and escape to the country. The title track ‘Carnage’ harks back to when Cave was heavily into Flannery O’Connor. He was escaping, to read her works “with a pencil and a plan”, to appropriate her messages, to reshape things.
Cave also talks to the departed, not as he did in ‘Ghosteen’, with pain and anguish, but in support, looking for answers as he acknowledges how close death has become over the last year. “Wherever you are darling, I’m not that far behind” he addresses his own muse, just as Leonard Cohen did to Marianne Ihlen (‘So Long Marianne’) on the number ‘Old Time’. “I’m just a little behind you, close enough to take your hand.”
Interestingly, this album comes just prior to the one off single ‘Grief’. This was Cave’s spoken word response to a fan, Cynthia, who asked whether he felt Arthur was still communicating to him through dreams. Although it won’t appear on this album, it is musically and lyrically a great connector between ‘Ghosteen’ and ‘Carnage’. The latter is much heavier than we’ve seen before, with the full weight of 2020 bearing down. It’s cathartic and cleansing, to a degree. But, honestly, I recommend you break up your listening into sessions for the A and B sides. A whole album could be overwhelming, especially, if any of these topics cut to the bone for you. Here’s hoping this is a moment in time and these topics fade into history. Until then be kind and stay safe, listeners.
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