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Seven Psalms Image
Metascore
75

Generally favorable reviews - based on 6 Critic Reviews What's this?

User Score
6.7

Generally favorable reviews- based on 6 Ratings

  • Summary: Nick Cave collaborated with Warren Ellis on this spoken word project that also features a 12-minute instrumental piece.
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Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 5 out of 6
  2. Negative: 0 out of 6
  1. 80
    These are powerful nuggets. Whether he’s addressing God directly or meditating on the nature of religion in more abstract terms (you never quite know), Cave’s words are potent and evocative.
  2. Jun 30, 2022
    80
    It’s an extremely powerful album – Cave and Ellis are superb writers, at the top of their game – even if you wonder how often you’ll listen to it, or indeed, what one quite vocal section of his fanbase will make of it.
  3. Mojo
    Jun 30, 2022
    80
    Each of them [psalms] is spoken word, less than two minutes long, and set to music that's ominous, ambient, spectral and spiritual. That's side one; side two is taken up with a 12-minute instrumental - a ruminative play of dark on dark, with a deep drone and synthesized choir of ghosts that's quite lovely. [Aug 2022, p.96]
  4. Uncut
    Jun 30, 2022
    70
    The bereft “Have Mercy On Me” and hopeful, lightly gospel “I Have Wandered All My Unending Days” are particularly striking, while the concluding 11-minute instrumental mix works as metaphor for Cave’s faith: immersive and foundational. [Jul 2022, p.25]
  5. Jun 30, 2022
    64
    On Seven Psalms, the speeches are the main event: The fact there is music playing at all seems largely incidental. Cave is a much more reliable narrator this time around, ditching the previous album’s flashes of mania and hilarity in favor of solemnity and sobriety.
  6. 60
    You could, just about, call these psalms remixes, in that the thematic stems hold true. But there is respite, too, in the gentler notes and oscillations of Splendour, Glorious Splendour.
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2 out of 3
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 3
  3. Negative: 1 out of 3
  1. Jul 8, 2022
    10
    What an incredible powerful collection. Crushingly sad but hopeful. Achingly beautiful.
  2. Jul 7, 2022
    10
    A very interesting and inspirational insight into the man behind the characters he so brilliantly captures within the narratives of his songs
  3. Jul 2, 2022
    1
    this album is a stark dull affair that plays more as a poetry reading than an album .it is written well but unfortunately fails to justify itself .