If the supernatural premise of “Joy” blurs the line between fact and fantasia, then the bittersweet “O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)” represents a more clear-eyed communion with the afterlife. The song is Wild God’s greatest outlier, and not just because of the programmed shuffle beats and Auto-Tuned smears. On an album that otherwise overwhelms you with IMAX-sized visions of dramatic weather events, untamed amphibians, and ghost teens, “O Wow O Wow” is Cave’s simple, sentimental tribute to a wild god who walked among us: Anita Lane, with whom Cave was creatively and romantically entwined at the dawn of the Bad Seeds. As elegies go, the song is surprisingly buoyant and even a little playful, thanks in large part to Lane herself, who turns up partway through in the form of a recorded phone conversation where she lovingly and laughingly reminisces about her early exploits with Cave, like a faded Polaroid that has flashed wondrously to life.
At the start of the album, “Song of the Lake” sets the emotional tenor for Wild God with a line pulled straight from “Humpty Dumpty”: “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men/Couldn’t put us back together again,” 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’s experienced a series of life-altering losses. Toward the album’s end, “O Wow O Wow” seems to provide a response: The pain of feeling broken is ultimately an affirmation that our late loved ones still live on within us. The day the hurting stops is the day they’re truly dead. Wild God reminds us that joy and sorrow aren’t mutually exclusive states, they’re more like adjoining rooms in a house; both the darkness and the light still bleed through the cracks in the doorway. Joy isn’t merely happiness felt, it’s happiness earned, and Wild God is a remarkable portrait of a man putting in the work required to cross the threshold.
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