Nick Cave & Warren Ellis Carnage LP (Vinyl)

Consequence Top 50 Albums Of 2021 - Rated 24/50!

Carnage is a new album by Nick Cave & Warren Ellis, recorded over a period of weeks during lockdown. Although the pair have composed & recorded many soundtracks together, and Warren is a long-term member of The Bad Seeds, this is the first time they have released an entire album of new songs as a duo.

Nick Cave describes the album as, "a brutal but very beautiful record nested in a communal catastrophe."

"Making Carnage was an accelerated process of intense creativity," says Warren Ellis, "the eight songs were there in one form or another within the first two and a half days."

They may have created Carnage as a duo partly out of pandemic necessity, but shedding the band also made good creative sense. Given the Bad Seeds' recent trajectory, and the paring down of personnel, you might expect further exploration of Ghosteen's meditative minimalism, and at times that is essentially what Carnage delivers. But in its most gripping and audacious moments, the album is much wilder than its predecessor. It draws from the formal language of modern cinema, concerned less with verses and choruses than images, settings, visceral portrayals of extreme emotional states... It's defined by its stark contrasts, at turns brutal, surreal, and romantic.