wild God

If the supernatural premise of “Joy” blurs the line between fact and fantasy, then the bittersweet “O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)” represents a cleaner communion with the afterlife. The song is wild Godit's the biggest outlier, and not just because of the programmed shuffle rates and Auto-Tuned spots. On an album that otherwise overwhelms you with IMAX-sized visions of dramatic weather, untethered amphibians and ghost teenagers, “O Wow O Wow” is Cave's simple, emotional tribute to a wild god who walked among us: Anita Lane, with whom Cave was creatively and romantically intertwined at the dawn of the Bad Seeds. As elegies go, the song is surprisingly lively and even a little playful, thanks in large part to Lane herself, who appears in part in the form of a recorded phone conversation where she fondly and laughingly reminisces about her early exploits with Cave , like a faded Polaroid that has amazingly sprung to life.

At the beginning of the album, “Song of the Lake” sets the emotional tenor wild God with a line pulled straight from “Humpty Dumpty”: “All the king's horses and all the king's men/I couldn't put us back together,” Cave sings, and suddenly a nursery rhyme we've heard a thousand times takes on a whole new uncomfortable meaning, coming from a man who has experienced a series of life-changing losses. Toward the end of the album, “O Wow O Wow” seems to provide a response: The pain of feeling broken is ultimately an affirmation that our loved ones still live within us. The day the pain stops is the day they are truly dead. wild God it reminds us that joy and sadness are not mutually exclusive states, they are more like adjoining rooms in a house. both darkness and light still bleed through the cracks in the door. Joy is not just the happiness you feel, it is the happiness earned wild God it is a remarkable portrait of a man doing the work required to cross the threshold.