Nick Cave and Warren Ellis: Carnage Review

I type this in a room, alone. It’s the same room I’ve spent the majority of the last year in. This is okay. It’s a pleasant room. I have it just how I like it. It has plenty to keep me occupied within. It lets the light stream in on sunny days like today. This is my pandemic space. I often count my blessings that I have it. That I can maintain it. It’s here the days stretch out and sometimes they take me places, places within. Sometimes it closes in on me, it presses the sides of my cranium and I struggle to see through the dullest of aches…..

Nick Cave has a balcony. He’s reading Flannery O’Connor. He has a ‘pencil and a plan’. This balcony recurs a few times, the temporal space he’s locked down in. Several other images recur throughout the record. Travel as a distant idea, no longer a promise. Water, the rain. “The child” (we all know which one). Trains (what is it with him and trains?) The record feels like a visit to a psyche that’s rooting for a way through, it’s a direct channel into the tense, prickly unknown that our lives have become.

It’s the first work I’ve heard that truly speaks of the pandemic, in words and tone. Sure, I’m thankful Taylor Swift has rediscovered her songwriting chops away from the pressures and strains that being that kind of famous must inflict, and a few others are making some noise from within the belly of this great, tiny, invisible beast, but this is the first one that’s I’ve heard that tries to speak to what these times are like. To live through. To try to make sense of. To have so many of those days that leave you glad you’ve been able to make it to dinner time without shooting someone ‘in the fuckin face.’

When it was touted as a ‘dark’ record, I’ll admit, I was excited to hear that. I thought it would provide a space that I could work off some of that thick, hot rage I have building within me. An anger at the very state of things that have led us into this mess. On the first listen, I realised this was not going to be the case. After spending a few days with this record now, I’ve started to realise how much that very idea asked of the creators. I mean, does anyone have the energy to fight right now? Does anyone have the spirit left to rage and howl? If you do, godspeed to you, and if you can direct that at some of the cunts that have blindly led us here, please come and talk to me. I have notes on who to attack first.

The personal is the political in a dance to empowerment that fights its way through our everyday. And, as such I think this may be one of the most political records of the man’s wildly varied career. Yet, it’s not for him to lay the blame at the feet of any easy targets. All the best to take it to the universal and hope there’s someone listening. The record starts with declarations of the ways we’re processing this. “There are some people trying to find out who / There are some people trying to find out why” yet then “There are some people aren’t trying to find anything / But that kingdom in the sky” and no winners are declared. These times are a search for meaning as much as anything else.

It’s been accused of losing it’s way as a record. Of lacking cohesion. I’ll be so bold as to claim that this is it’s purpose. We lack cohesion as a planet right now. We have no direction home. And, as I’ve come to expect as a long term fan, it shifts in tone throughout. It starts with a pure Suicide-esque pump, the falsetto bringing to mind the theme from Psycho, the vibe pure John Carpenter. God here is sinister in his absence. Yet he’s ever present in his poking at us. Every day we feel it…. “HAND OF GOD…. HAND OF GOD…..HAND OF GOD….”

It retains a lot of the ambient tonality of the last few records, yet at points adds necessary layers of tension. There’s moments on here that leap out of the stereo. The vocal to Shattered Ground, one of his finest in my opinion. The clacking intro to White Elephant (is it just me who feels this is very much like the intro to Finising Jubilee Street?), a track that has one of the best lyrics the man has ever laid on a tune. He manages to take the current strain of anger running through humanity and take a wider view of it, with no judgement for the protagonist, here espousing his defence of his territory, his balcony, his room, with tears in his eyes and his elephant gun. It sounds like its all he has left. It shifts for the second half to a rousing, silly, brilliant call to God himself. It strikes me as the tired, abandoned cousin to the end of Hiding All Away. The War has finally come and now we pray for the ‘kingdom in the sky”.

Albuquerque strains beautifully at the very notion of travel. We’re going nowhere fast and god only knows how we all dream of those days where you could just get on a train and go. “We won’t get to anywhere, Baby / Unless you take me there” - Lord, please. Take me there. It comes from the heart of the spaces we pray for escape from.

We end, back on the balcony, with another celebration of the perfect ideal. The love for which this is all worth it. “This morning is amazing and so are you… you are languid and lovely and lazy.. and what doesn’t kill you just makes you crazier.” It feels like crazy is all we have right now.

It isn’t the record I expected. Or the one I wanted. The one I’d planned in my head drew blood. That record may come. When the space in between is filled with majesties like this, I’m more than happy to wait. This is certainly the record we all deserved, and definitely the one we didn’t know we needed.