If the supernatural premise of “Pleasure” blurs the road between truth and fantasia, then the bittersweet “O Wow O Wow (How Great She Is)” represents a extra clear-eyed communion with the afterlife. The music is Wild God’s biggest outlier, and never simply due to the programmed shuffle beats and Auto-Tuned smears. On an album that in any other case overwhelms you with IMAX-sized visions of dramatic climate occasions, untamed amphibians, and ghost teenagers, “O Wow O Wow” is Cave’s easy, sentimental tribute to a wild god who walked amongst us: Anita Lane, with whom Cave was creatively and romantically entwined on the daybreak of the Dangerous Seeds. As elegies go, the music is surprisingly buoyant and even slightly playful, thanks largely to Lane herself, who turns up partway by within the type of a recorded cellphone dialog the place she lovingly and laughingly reminisces about her early exploits with Cave, like a pale Polaroid that has flashed wondrously to life.
At first of the album, “Music of the Lake” units the emotional tenor for Wild God with a line pulled straight from “Humpty Dumpty”: “All of the king’s horses and all of the king’s males/Couldn’t put us again collectively once more,” Cave sings, and instantly a nursery rhyme we’ve heard a thousand instances takes on a complete new uncomfortable which means, coming from a person who’s skilled a sequence of life-altering losses. Towards the album’s finish, “O Wow O Wow” appears to offer a response: The ache of feeling damaged is finally an affirmation that our late family members nonetheless reside on inside us. The day the hurting stops is the day they’re really useless. Wild God reminds us that pleasure and sorrow aren’t mutually unique states, they’re extra like adjoining rooms in a home; each the darkness and the sunshine nonetheless bleed by the cracks within the doorway. Pleasure isn’t merely happiness felt, it’s happiness earned, and Wild God is a exceptional portrait of a person placing within the work required to cross the brink.
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