Nick Cave’s doctrine of doubt His new album is triumphantly heterodox

Chief among them was “Tupelo” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. I listened to it disturbed: a glorious moment of lightning-struck damnation. Describing the birth of Elvis Aaron Presley, alongside his still-born identical brother Jesse Garon Presley, it was an unholy chasm through which the night poured. I could barely piss straight with fear, and I’ve not stopped listening since.

Following the parting of Mick Harvey in 2009, the group changed their sound, embracing the absence. You can hear the space that had suddenly appeared and the unlikely influences that helped to fill it — electronic music, ambient drone.

“Well, if I were to use that threadbare metaphor of albums being like children,” Cave noted at the time, “then Push The Sky Away is the ghost-baby in the incubator and Warren’s loops are its tiny, trembling heart-beat.” And these claims were not hyperbole. It required a different kind of listening, and there were fans who were left behind, preferring, to continue the threadbare metaphor, the feral street urchins of their earlier work.

The four albums that followed feel like a sequence or an era; cinematic, measured, atmospheric. Yet as Cave and Ellis continued, and the cruelties of fate took the heaviest of tolls, they changed again. The boundaries of songs began to blur into one another, verse/chorus/verse dissolved. The music felt more and more like painting. The moonless nocturne of Skeleton Tree. Or the vast Turneresque swirls and washes of Ghosteen.

Now Wild God, the new album, marks a new phase. It’s lush, built from vast walls of sound and sudden explosive choral crescendos. An album of the most extraordinary joy, it’s not a complete abandonment of the new or the old. Traces of both can be found throughout (the horses, myths, meta lyricism, Jubilee Street, an eye for the debauched) but the synthesis has resulted in a different creature, an album that feels blissfully out of time. The choirs, bells, crashing of cymbals, the hard-earned euphoria, feel antithetical to these days of lamentation and the gnashing of teeth.

The imagery of the title track feels like something bursting out of one of William Blake’s illuminated manuscripts. ‘Final Rescue Attempt’ has an astonishingly wistful feel. At the other end of the spectrum, the finale of ‘Conversion’ is the band’s most intense climax since ‘There She Goes, My Beautiful World’. ‘O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)’ is a tribute to the late Anita Lane — once Cave’s partner in love and song — with lyrics free of piety but showing signs of the cloven-hooved Old Nick, proving the sacred and profane are never opposites but rather are wound around each other. ‘Frogs’ is open-hearted uplifting, filled with the sheer intoxication of life when faced with the smallest moments, a frog in a puddle “leaping to God, amazed of love, amazed of pain, amazed to be back in the water again.” A triumphant cloudburst of a song.

The production throughout feels like something beloved that’s been long-lost and recovered; Leonard Cohen Death of a Ladies’ Man with MDMA instead of barbiturates. The mood is one of escape but to escape you first need to recognise you’re confined.

The Bad Seeds have had their fair share of critical acclaim, yet in recent years an interesting development has taken place in the way Nick Cave is perceived and depicted. It centres around the idea that Cave has changed, become conservative, a God-botherer, betraying his earlier self. There’s a vague sense of disgrace in the air, quite different from the now-fashionable disgrace he cultivated as a young, shock-headed degenerate in Berlin in the early Eighties. The reasons can be guessed at — a typical sneering attitude towards success, a disdain for artists who are prolific or even just visible, a reaction against his role as agony uncle/psychopomp/semi-reluctant oracle of the internet in his stoical Red Hand Files. Yet there’s another deeper more reflective reason for the sense of casual disdain and it’s encapsulated in the album’s title.

Let’s consider that perhaps Nick Cave hasn’t changed at all, or at least not in the ways we’d like to think. A superficial reading of this would be to say that he has stayed still and the whole world has moved or slid. It’s a familiar claim, often voiced by tech bros claiming the Overton Window forced them to the Right when they’ve always been Liberal. The argument usually continues along the lines that all the pearl-clutching censorious Mary Whitehouse types on the Right, whom artists have had to battle for free expression are now to be found on the Left. The pendulum swings too far and if only we could get it to settle in the middle where the reasonable apolitical people are then everything would be hunky dory. Which of course is palpable bullshit.

Set aside the overly convenient dichotomy of Right and Left, and the comforting illusion of the Centre, and think instead in terms of orthodox and heterodox. The former always conforms, whatever the climate, however shameless. The latter didn’t fit then, doesn’t fit now and will never fit.

But the idea that Nick Cave’s religiosity is suddenly a problem or even a recent conversion is belied by most of his discography. In fact, it was those looming biblical shadows that first attracted me to his work and at times alienated me from it. Now a recovering Catholic, I was educated in schools run by nuns and priests and repeatedly locked horns with them. At the time, the church was infallible, hardly bothering to conceal its horrendous crimes against women and children in Ireland and beyond. It wasn’t just taboo to raise issues of abuse, homophobia, hypocrisy etc. It was forbidden to ask questions. I would ask the priests questions about the strange, puzzling details I’d chanced upon in the stories and language of the King James Bible and was completely unprepared for the hostility such enquiries would ignite. I realise now it was simply a case of orthodoxy. Questions, any sign of curiosity, were a threat to dogma. The Christian flock was not supposed to bleat, even if some had got wind of the slaughterhouse.

From the beginning, the Bad Seeds lyrics were steeped in that misty Jacobean version of the Bible. It was there in their album titles — Kicking Against the Pricks, The Good Son — and in countless songs. For every murder ballad, a spiritual. It’s even there in their name, with the Bad Seeds originating in the Good Book. This was a rich mine, and what was salvaged could be adapted in surprising subversive ways. When he used Jesus or God, at times he might just as well be singing about drugs, sex, pain, or love and its catastrophes. The themes allowed for the illumination of life at its most wretched and beautiful. It’s almost animist at heart but fed through Christian iconography – the thorns and the waves and the errant stars.

Witnessing the unfolding church scandals and how those who’d spoken out publicly like Sinéad O’Connor were made into scapegoats or sineaters, I gradually transformed into a righteous little bastard or to put it another way an evangelising atheist. Twenty years ago, I saw the Bad Seeds on their incendiary Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus and left in a state of shock, such was their energy and charisma. Yet I felt a nagging reluctance in my heart. Cave’s brilliant, frenzied tent revivalist/snake handler/faith healer performance set off alarm bells. Having escaped one cult, albeit a very powerful 2,000-year-old one, I was overly cautious about signing up for another.

Eventually, I realised there was a reactionary mirroring quality to atheism, where you could become as self-righteous and rigid as your enemy, defined and controlled by a form of negation. Mainly, I was turned off by the joyless tiresomeness of some of its primary advocates. I also had not suffered quite enough to be relieved of certain egocentric illusions. I had not yet come to know the things you don’t want are the things that give your life real knowledge — grief, heartbreak, illness, estrangement and exile. But where do you go when you begin to doubt your own doubt?

It turns out Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds were already there. The religiosity in the songs was built from doubt, suffering, absurdity, closer to Dostoevsky or existentialism than tele-evangelism. We are in the eternal, the songs tell us, every little moment, and life and death are in here with us. Wild God feels like an opening and a radical one, given the constriction we’re increasingly subject to. How narrow, for instance, to think that writing about religious themes shackles you to the moribund, slowly sinking religious establishment, discarding the realms that Cave has tapped into.

Certainty is a curse, damaging for activists, and fatal for artists. Cave gets it. There are wry lines, wrapped in enigmas in Wild God, “Who are these gods that you now defend? / And what purpose do they serve now at the end of time?” He replies not with apologetic laments or millenarian doom but with perfect inarguable euphoria. With the ecstatic doubt evident in the title track, whether the lead character is a soaring deity or just an old man in a retirement village propelling through his memory.

I still don’t believe in God, and I loathe the Church, and though I may be dumb, I am not dumb enough to deny I’m a Catholic writer. Whether the heavens are empty or not, I was permanently moulded by Jesuits. The hints were there, though it took me a while to recognise the compulsions. The countless pilgrimages. The need for rituals. The love for iconography and disdain for those who know only how to dismantle and not how to build. Listening to this cathartic album, it started to occur to me that maybe I’d got Longinus wrong. Maybe he shouldn’t have been a soldier after all. Maybe this cursed fallen figure should have been an artist. One who wanders, not smug and privileged in their certainty, not wielding belief or unbelief in order to judge or cudgel others, not resolving anything except for the small but significant consolation that some other poor wild bastard is out in the storm-beaten night with us all, bearing a lantern and somehow singing a song of joy.