Record Store Day is always an interesting event as new songs are released especially for this day, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds were no exception this year: a new track called ‘Animal X’, an outtake off ‘Push the Sky Away' – a sort of follow up, mirror song, sister track to ‘Water’s Edge – has surfaced.
I am saying this because of the city girl theme, the seaside lust, the animal X/girl meeting an animal Y/boy ‘down on the waterfront’, and the mention of all these dismantled body parts in both songs:
‘Their legs wide to the world like bibles open/To be speared and taking their bodies apart like toys/They dismantle themselves by the water's edge’, sings Nick Cave in ‘Water’s Edge’, ‘And she put her hand on his stomach just for the joy of it/But his stomach was where his head was/And she put her hand on his head just for the joy of it/But his head was where his feet were’, he continues in ‘Animal X’
In both songs, the music, going in loops behind Nick Cave’s deliciously creepy tone, has such a menacing tone and the lyrics open such a voyeuristic and decadent alternative universe, that at the end, I am not sure what is exactly happening!
And there is always a cosmic-mystic reference in Cave’s songs, this time with the line ‘They can build their gods way up high/ They can’t build their gods/but they don’t own the sky’… And at this time, the song becomes something different, bigger,… Oh but it feels so reductive to attempt to explain poetry, the song will produce its own magic when you listen to it, since, as Nick Cave said in an interview, ‘All songs have the capacity to collect weight around them, by the music and by the way that they’re sung’, and I love this idea.
So just enter again Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ dark, mysterious and visceral world: