We know not to trust the hand of God. John Milton warned us of the threat from above: ‘Should intermitted vengeance arm again / His red right hand to plague us?’ Out of this Nick Cave conjured a nomad – ghost, god, man, guru – who embodied both the capricious motives of our creator and Cave’s own spiritual ambivalence.
God’s red right hand bears vengeance in its palm, and a single swipe brings plague (from the Latin plāga: a stroke, a blow). Or, if not a plague, something like it. Certainly, our current situation doesn’t measure up to the pestilence surrounding Milton as he wrote, or dictated, his great poems. When he said plague he meant plague, ignorant as he was of the half-serious disaster rhetoric we now use out of habit. Typical of our shimmering age, the crisis we face is obscure, seemingly myriad in its forms, patiently evolving, disputed.
Artists of all kinds have struggled to get their arms around the pandemic. The subject has been thrust upon them, and history tells us that even the most calamitous events are just as likely to stultify as inspire.
‘I had been sitting at my desk — suddenly and shockingly not travelling — writing lyrics and poems into a void, with no real objective other than to make sense of this stationary moment,’ wrote Cave in March. It is this ‘stationary moment’ that is being addressed by Cave and Warren Ellis in Carnage, their first non-soundtrack album as a duo. ‘I think Warren’s experience was not dissimilar,’ added Cave. ‘I think we both felt the enforced stasis, not just unnerving, but also strangely and fitfully energizing, and so, when we began working in the studio, Carnage came out fast and necessary, as proof of life.’
Cave was never entirely comfortable with storytelling. His adhesive, detail-rich narrative voice dictated the form of his songs. ‘If I can’t visualize the thing on the page, it’s completely meaningless to me,’ he said in 2004. ‘I can’t write that “I love you, baby,” which are the songs I love, like a James Brown song, that just come and “get funky!”’
Things have changed. The banal, the platitudinous, now have their place: in Ghosteen’s ‘Leviathan’ Cave sings not ‘I love you, baby’ but something even more wrenchingly innocent: ‘I love my baby and my baby loves me’ – over and over until it carries the weight of incantation.
Ghosteen featured songs about grief, love, salvation. It was a lush fantasia charged with pain and longing. Carnage is sharper round the edges. Cave the strutting preacher makes a slight return, albeit wearing a smock of sadness and defeat. ‘Hand of God’, the album’s extraordinary opening track, stands apart. The first lines, against a gentle piano, are a false trail:
There are some people trying to find out who
There are some people trying to find out why
There's some people who aren't trying to find anything
But that kingdom in the sky
In the sky
You can barely hear the repeated ‘in the sky’ because a plunging drone smothers it, followed by a lo-fi, Suicide-style beat. The strings are Ellis all over, but tugging rather than swelling, coasting on a sort of guilty thrill, not quite euphoric, not quite sinister.
Cave’s cadence brings to mind the relentless Old Testament blues of ‘Tupelo’: ‘Way down low, way down low, let the river cast his spell on me’. The river is roiling yet static, a body, a bed, a body on a bed: ‘You’re a body of water spread across the hotel bed / I'm gonna swim to the middle and never come up again’. It's characteristic of late Cave, the domestic intruding on the atavistic, but it has a different resonance now that many of us are, as he puts it, not travelling.
Near the end of the song the strings stab like a cue from a horror film. The effect is at least partly synthetic, even hammy. I might be alone in hearing mock-hysteria in Cave's falsetto chant. The panic and dread can only be regarded from an ironic distance. ‘I'm a hammer-and-nails kind of guy,’ said Cave in 2006, simultaneously highlighting and downplaying his devoutness. In the 2016 film One More Time with Feeling he reads the lyrics of a song called ‘Steve McQueen’ (forthcoming on B-Sides & Rarities Part II). It has all the cracked swagger of a Frederick Seidel poem: ‘Sometimes I get the elevator to the top of the Burj Al Arab / And shoot my guns across Dubai / Bang, bang, bang, I’m that kinda guy’. But God is never far away: ‘God is great, chances are / God is good, well, I wouldn’t go that far’.
When Ellis joined the Bad Seeds in 1994 he brought the sincerity and polish that Blixa Bargeld had spent his career subverting. Which is not to say Ellis is exactly orthodox, with his violins and his tiny guitars. He doesn’t play riffs. His melodic lines are almost always simple or partial. And in ‘Hand of God’, when the strings fall away and there is just the fuzzy thump of the bass, you realise how tenuous the song is, the spareness of the construction.
Some critical responses have taken Carnage to be a reflection on the present political moment. References to protestors and fallen statues in the song ‘White Elephant’ were interpreted by at least one writer as ‘thinly veiled’ commentary on right wing excess. Possibly; if you want. Cave has said the song is dedicated to the sculptor and painter Thomas Houseago, and that he wrote it quickly, in one sitting. This might explain the antic non sequiturs.
I’m an ice sculpture melting in the sun
I’m an ice sculpture with an elephant gun
I’m an ice sculpture made of elephant-sized tears
Raining gas and salt upon your heads
The president has called in the Feds
I’ve been planning this for years
It ends with what might be Carnage’s only moment of catharsis, like a brief hallucination amid a fever, revisiting the album’s opening lines:
A time is coming
A time is nigh
For the kingdom
In the sky
Don't ask who
Don't ask why
’Cause there's a kingdom in the sky
We're all coming home
For a while
We're back to the booming hallelujahs of Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus. But it’s the cornered, restless yearning of ‘Hand of God’ that leaves the deepest impression.