Nick Cave – Seven Psalms
Cave Things

Dominique Van Cappellen-Waldock – Fleur de Feu: A Fire Ceremony
Caliban

In the opening lines of “Into My Arms”, one of the finest love songs of recent times, Nick Cave tells us “I don’t believe in an interventionist God”. That’s daring at very least for pop, but it goes on to deliver a typical double-conjunction or -negative: “But I know, darling, that you do / But if I did, I would kneel down and ask him / Not to intervene when it came to you.” Asking the deity to redirect the loved one “Into my arms, O Lord” might seem perverse, but Cave has always had a curious relationship with the Almighty and his works.

Recent years have seen him cope with the death of a teenage son. In attempting to confront the experience on LPs Ghosteen and Carnage, Cave suddenly made that popular sub-genre “the break-up album” seem very shallow and trivial indeed. Now, he has lost another child, albeit in young adulthood, and his already rather personal theodicy must be quite seriously bent out of shape. Cave’s response has been to release a short spoken word album of Seven Psalms.