Cultural Seeds: Essays on the Work of Nick Cave is a clear argument that Nick Cave belongs firmly within the canon of profoundly influential musical balladeers and artists. The volume, edited by two Australian scholars, Karen Welberry and Tanya Dalziell, is composed of divergent writings from journalists and scholars of varied degrees of intimacy with their subject. As artists of the southern hemisphere are given less attention, Nick Cave, with his prodigious artistic production in music, film, literature and poetry, is an important figure for serious examination. It is challenging to present fresh insights into an artist who has himself done numerous interviews and written essays over the decades, allowing him to express much of his own point of view about his work and intentions. These essays engage Cave's work with varying degrees of success and insight. The overall effect serves to construct – rather than deconstruct – Cave as a legendary figure.

The text is organised in three sections. The first, ‘Cultural Contexts’, situates Cave's historic and Austro-Anglican life, particularly his youthful developments in Australia. The second, ‘Intersections’, examines the various forms of artistic expression that constitute Cave's works, including his celebrity persona, his literary and cinematic contributions and his most contemporary incarnation of the band Grinderman. The third – and most successful – section is the series of articles on ‘the Sacred’ which examine the metaphysical portent of Cave's art and persona.

In attempting to situate Cave, each article in Cultural Contexts in some way addresses Cave's ‘Australian-ness’ and biographical development. Burt attends to the historic and generational context of Cave's lyrical obsessions. Clinton and Jayasinghe look at the musical, geographic and performative setting from which Cave emerged. Welberry considers the Australian postcolonial character that mixes serious humour, an ambivalent relationship to British aesthetic traditions, and exile. Clinton is most effective in locating the musical context of Cave's pre-Birthday Party musical influences. In Cave's earliest music endeavours with The Boys Next Door, Clinton vividly shows the unique constellation of the influential bands of the antipodean music scene, pitched towards The Stooges, The Cramps, David Bowie, and fellow Australian artists. The Australian moment of punk with its own unique characteristics laid many of the foundations for Cave's subsequent work. Clinton notes that the first Boys Next Door record consisted 60/40 of covers and also discusses the importance of Australia's rigorous pub gig circuit in the development of the band (over 100 shows in the band's first years of existence). The Australian punk moment allowed for the performance of songs authored by others, producing an attitude more akin to the jazz ‘standard’ rather than the ‘cover’ as generally conceived in the post-punk rock landscape. Standards are performed classic material which are then imprinted with the performer's own distinctive style. This recontextualising of the songs of others has been an enduring mainstay of Cave's musical contributions. Clinton shows the unique antipodean moment that created the space for the continued usage of other-authored work as well as Cave's musical influences.

The essays of ‘Intersections’ consider the various forms of Cave's artistic achievements and show an ongoing slippage between Nick Cave, his persona and his narrative protagonists. Bilton examines Nick Cave as antagonist nihilistic celebrity. Yet, curiously, the focus on his performance is based on an analysis of song lyrics rather than the interaction of the performer and his audience. Hart looks at Cave as an author of Gothic narrative excess, placing Cave firmly within the middle of the literary context of Gothic literature. In the article ‘Red Right Hand’ Danks considers Cave's contributions to cinema. As film comprises a relatively small part of Cave's creative work, it has been far less examined. Danks successfully links Cave's cinematic contributions by pointing out how his work in this medium relies on the characteristics of Cave's musical persona: melodramatic, theatrical, excessive, carnivalesque, unhinged, decadent, melancholic, violent, self-conscious and deterritorialised. She points out the fractured nature of the repatriated expat who maintains an Australian concept of self abroad. He is both out of place and out of time, connecting to other various imagined outlands. Jones looks at Cave's most recent work with Grinderman as a back-to-basics rock band read in the context of the wider rock charts rather than in the musical frame in which Cave operates. The strongest element is Jones's discussion of the Grinderman cover art portraying performance as both sexualised and humiliating.

The essays that consider Cave's work in relationship to spiritual themes are by far the best and highlight the differences in intellectual maturity between many of the writings in the volume. By far the best piece is Eaglestone's ‘From Mutiny to Calling upon the Author: Cave's Religion’. By looking at Cave's oeuvre and its intense relationship to the numinous, Eaglestone makes the strongest case for Cave as a serious artist for interrogation. He demonstrates the remarkableness of Cave's work with a rich engagement of the deeply religious themes that Cave uses to address ‘the issues of fear and angst, our anticipation of death, moral action and inaction, choice, love and hate, the establishment of decay of community – indeed all the complicated tapestry of being in the world’ (p. 141). Eaglestone shows how the use of religious narratives to approach existential issues is the core of Cave's singular aesthetic. Wiseman-Trowse makes a strong case for the role of Elvis with his dead twin as a Messianic figure in Cave's theological interrogations, musing on the duality and the ebb and flow of incarnations of ‘The Good Son’, and ‘Bad Seed’, the triumphant King and sacrificial/sacrilegious child. McCreddon discusses the co-mingling of an abject carnal and the religious in Cave's lyrics and writings. The final essay uses the Melbourne exhibition on Cave to underline the consistent tropes of melancholia, contradiction, animal imagery, language, Gothic excess, and Cave's connection of creativity to divinity and imagination.

While thoughtful, these essays are rarely critical of their subject and avoid the more controversial elements of Cave's work at every turn. Gender is dealt with in an unsophisticated manner. There is a certain element of trying to have it both ways – as the editor, Welberry, does in her piece; addressing the claims of Reynolds and Press of misogyny in Cave's work, her answer is ‘he must be joking or is he?’ This lack of critique fits with the basic intent of the volume, which is to locate Cave as an artist worthy of the attention given to canonical artists such as Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan. Cave deserves the more richly nuanced mature and sophisticated analysis à la Eaglestone. The authors love Nick Cave and the book seems to beg you to as well. However, as an artist who has never begged for his audience to like him, it creates an odd disjuncture. Overall, these essays are a necessary start for a consideration of the abundantly provocative works of Nick Cave, the prolific polymath and the quixotic counter culture anti-hero of post-colonial inverted diaspora.