Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Wild God

on Clear/Pink Vinyl Nick Cave doesn't do happy. He's a remarkably literate and insightful songwriter, and he can be one of the most intense and magnetic performers you're ever likely to see, yet even at his liveliest, his work looks to the dark side of the human experience. Though he can be genuinely tender and compassionate on albums like 1997's The Boatman's Call and 2001's No More Shall We Part, he's the man you turn to for a dark night of the soul, not a sunny afternoon. Even by Cave's standards, 2016's Skeleton Tree and 2019's Ghosteen were somber and inward looking, and with good reason -- in 2015, Cave's 15-year-old son Arthur died after falling off a cliff, and both albums felt like acts of public mourning, a tragedy compounded by the death of another of his children, Jethro Lazenby, in 2022 at the age of 31. 2024's Wild God sounds like the work of a man who is still coming to terms with heartbreaking loss, and is utterly unashamed to show us his scars. At the same time, Wild G