Disparate albums with a common core

The new releases by the Australian rocker Nick Cave and the American performance artist Laurie Anderson would seem to have little in common. Co-credited to the Bad Seeds, Wild God (Bad Seed/PIAS) explores Cave’s developing fascination with religion in general and—to quote its final number—the Man who “steps from the tomb / in His rags and His wounds” in particular. Anderson’s is titled Amelia (Nonesuch) after Amelia Earhart, the pioneering aviatrix whose final flight the album explores.

Wild God combines prog rock, art rock, and, thanks to the Double R Collective choir, gospel. Amelia combines modern classical, ambient, and “experimental.” Cave sings in an exultant, dramatic baritone. Anderson recites with an eerie detachment, making particularly effective use of aural filters and pregnant pauses.

Cave draws on demi-mythological characters (the subject of his title cut, for instance), private symbolism (sodium light, cinnamon horses, turpentine trees, strawberry moons, dancing crayons), and, in “Long Dark Night,” the 16th-century Christian mystic John of the Cross. Anderson draws on Earhart’s flight itinerary (Oakland, Miami, San Juan, etc.) and her radio communications.

The albums do, however, overlap—three times, in fact.

Each, for example, contains an inside joke based on a song from the ’60s (Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down” in the case of Cave’s “Frogs,” Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” in the case of Anderson’s “Fly Into the Sun”).

Both also deliver audio-vérité jolts by using spoken-word recordings of the now-deceased. Anderson’s “This Modern World” is 34 seconds of Earhart herself discussing how the “applications of scientific achievement” have revolutionized women’s lives. In “O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is),” Cave’s late partner Anita Lane delivers a reminiscence about her and Cave’s carefree days that begins “Do you remember we used to really, really have fun?”

The profoundest intersection is the third. In “Conversion” (an experience of which Cave remains wary, having recently described himself as a “believer amongst unbelievers” and an “unbeliever amongst believers”), Cave describes a girl who’s drawn into an “old god … like a flame.” “Touched by the spirit and touched by the flame,” he sings. “I never ever saw you so beautiful.” In “Fly Into the Sun” Anderson-as-Earhart recites, “I’m going to fly into the sun, / drop down through the air into the sea.” “Flying to the sun is a self-immolating kind of experience,” Anderson says in her album’s trailer. “Why would you do that? Well, for the experience of throwing yourself into the brightest light you could find.”

“Our God is a consuming fire,” says the writer of Hebrews. If only intuitively, both Cave and Anderson seem to know what he means.