Given the spare, textural soundscapes of 2016's
Skeleton Tree and 2019's
Ghosteen, it was not hard to wonder just how much
Nick Cave still needed the
Bad Seeds to bring his visions to life. 2021's
Carnage suggests he may not need them at all outside of his longtime collaborator
Warren Ellis.
Cave and
Ellis collaborated on
Carnage while they were in lockdown thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, and in most respects it's of a piece with
Skeleton Tree and
Ghosteen, with
Cave's dour, doomstruck lyrical meditations taking center stage while the musical accompaniment hovers in the background. This puts it in a very similar stylistic place to those two albums, though it also manages to sound more diverse, and also more emotionally upfront. This music came out of a time of fear and uncertainty, and much of
Carnage reflects those emotions, yet there's a sense of fractured, gospel-informed hope in "White Elephant" and a glorious epiphany of love and life's possibilities in "Balcony Man" that's as close to unguarded optimism as one could ever imagine coming from
Cave. This music is rooted in mood rather than melody, as one might expect, though
Cave and
Ellis have given it a far livelier pulse than they did on the
Bad Seeds albums that immediately preceded it. The tight focus of the bass patterns and the growl of the violins and guitars on "Old Time" and the percussive effect of the vocal loops on "Hand of God" recall the well-crafted menace of
the Bad Seeds' peak years; while ultimately this music has nothing to do with rock & roll, it is intense and deeply felt, and will draw in nearly anyone who meets it on its own terms. There is greater sense of spontaneous energy in
Carnage than in much of
Cave's music of this period, and that doesn't blunt the craft of this album. It's the work of two collaborative artists who are in the midst of a later-period renaissance that has spawned powerful, evocative music that speaks to its time without being confined to the crises that sparked its creation. ~ Mark Deming
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