Carnage

Carnage was clearly made in the same creative breath as Ghosteen. We remain in the grip of Cave’s loss and its fractal of consequences – a haunt enabled further by Ellis at the peak of his powers.

Carnage is infused with profound and almost inescapable grief. But as this particularly audacious singer-songwriter grapples with isolation, loneliness, loss and the hard emotional graft of endurance, all set against a backdrop of apocalyptic threat, the personal becomes universal. Carnage may just be the greatest lockdown album yet.

Although the sonic mood mellows after the first two tracks, listeners will be invited to share the transcendent joy in memories of a lost child; the awe of an uxorious lover whose prayer-like love for his wife is a continual saving grace; and the frustration of a caged man with an “open road” of a heart.

‘Carnage’ is arguably Cave and Ellis’ best record since The Bad Seeds’ latter day reinvention on 2013’s ‘Push The Sky Away’, or maybe even ‘Abattoir Blues’. It’s certainly two master craftsmen at the peak of their melodramatic powers.

What Cave and Ellis have crafted with Carnage is a refreshing respite from chaos, a record that sits at the burning edge of dawn and anticipates destruction’s undoing.

Cave remains inspirational working widescreen miracles from cataclysmic events. [May 2021, p.85]

Nick Cave may very well be the avatar for the idea that what we think of as “mellow” can be “heavy” and vice versa. With Carnage, he and Ellis prove that point yet again. Believe it or not, they also stretch themselves again, suggesting there may be no end to the inspiration they have up their sleeves.

‘Carnage’ is a jewel in the Cave-Ellis cannon. A thrilling piece of work that sources a sweet-spot between the unbound introspection of the Bad Seeds’ recent work and the furious fire lit beneath Grinderman and The Birthday Party.

Constructed amid the dystopia of 2020, ‘CARNAGE’ instead stands as something unique, the sound of two vastly experienced musicians removing themselves from expectations, and constructing something both beautiful and visceral, tender and blood-thirsty, wholly terrifying and completely absorbing.

You can chalk Carnage up as anything from a zeitgeist experiment to a flawed masterpiece, but there’s something precious and compassionate at its heart that I honestly believe will make the world a better place in its own peculiar way, beyond the scope of critical evaluation.

For an album called Carnage, on the surface it appears to have none, but the inner turmoil of Nick Cave’s psyche is full of it. He fantasizes about long lost loves, but also about shooting you in the fucking face, and it’s this toying with our emotions makes Carnage one of Cave’s most maddeningly beautiful records.

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.

It is an album, certainly, that carries the magic and surprise that belongs only to strange times, that belongs to this moment completely: a record of the way we saw the world, once, the way it sounded, the way it felt, as we all stood still and watched.

Compared with the highly structured Ghosteen (a double album meditation on grief and spirituality, complete with intermission), Carnage is a more concise though no less ordered record. Much as the Bad Seeds’ songs now push into oceanic drift, Cave’s narratives move between worlds fictional and not, the horrific and the consoling. [Mar 2021, p.20]

With Carnage, Cave and Ellis have successfully balanced introspection and self reflection with the tumult and confusion of the wider world. It’s a hugely powerful statement.

If Carnage’s feverish first half sometimes recalls David Lynch, its austere second is more like Terrence Malick.

Where in the past, Cave used artistic practice to escape "whatever it was that was pursuing me," on Carnage, he and Warren Ellis confront it head on. The result is a record that sometimes collapses under the weight of that task, but is nonetheless a remarkable demonstration of their artistic power.

For as sparse as it sounds, there’s great depth to Carnage.

Carnage covers broader range than most of the Bad Seeds' recent records, cramming plenty of Cave's various stylings into a neat, eight-song package. For all of Cave's hunger and glee to return to the foreboding sounds of his past, it's when he opts for pure catharsis and bliss that he album achieves its full power.