NEW ALBUMS
Trauma is “very damaging to the creative process” says Cave, but an LP coloured by the loss of his son emerged eventually. By James McNair. Illustration by Paul Heredia.
Nick Cave mourns, Bon Iver baffles, Syd Arthur take a trip, Leonard Cohen goes dark, Frank Ocean beguiles.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
Your child passing away before you do. They say it’s the very worst thing that can happen, and what parent would disagree? Since his son Arthur died aged 15 in July 2015 after plunging from a chalk cliff in Sussex, Nick Cave has fallen prey to the seeming elasticity of time. Only fleetingly, the singer has said, has his mind been able to escape the gravitational pull, the near-constant reboot, of his life’s new and devastating year zero. As the media reported on the tragedy with wildly varying degrees of sensitivity, we looked on and winced, knowing that sooner or later Cave would likely attempt to articulate his feelings. Clearly, these were more deeply troubled waters than those that begat, say, The Boatman’s Call, but you sensed that Cave – a workaholic and an incorrigible traveller to the heart of darkness – would find an outlet channel somehow. Though the sixteenth Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds album began life late in 2014 at Retreat Studios, Brighton, Cave and his family’s subsequent loss inevitably colours the record’s direction, as well as its vulnerable performances, its tangible sense of stalwart Bad Seeds rallying around, and its sometimes beautiful, more often anguished spirit. Skeleton Tree was eventually completed at London’s Air Studios early in 2016, and it’s perhaps on Magneto – a discomfiting sprawl of forlorn guitars, tentative piano, and bilious bass synth – that Cave is most candid about what he has been going through: “Oh the urge to kill someone was basically overwhelming/I had such hard blues down there in the supermarket queues,” he intones bleakly. Grief, this dark fever dream of an album intimates, can be deepened and further complicated when the griever is a public figure; known. There’s a somewhat improvised-sounding feel to the typically idiosyncratic lyrics of the eight songs the album dispenses in less than 40 minutes. It’s largely a record of funereal intensity, barebones playing and truly haunting atmospherics; no place for the timid. Cave has expressed concerns about not strengthening his voice enough prior to going into the studio, but this searching record sounds instinctive and doesn’t call for muscle – it calls for heart. Audibly and obviously, Cave’s faith has been sorely tested, but not ditched, judging by the rosary he’s seen clutching in the album’s accompanying documentary One More Time With Feeling (see Back Story). On the jittery, percussive, ever unravelling Anthrocene, the singer observes that “this sweet world is so much older” now, but it’s still sweet. Loss, the great leveller, the great focuser, accentuates beauty and wonder. Opening song Jesus Alone, with its animate distortion sounds and keening, otherworldly synth, is one of several compositions part-dependent on the kind of musical happenstance that Cave and multiinstrumentalist Warren Ellis have deployed so effectively in their recent film soundtracks. As Cave’s wife Susie alludes to with obvious discomfort in One More Time With Feeling, however, the opening line of Jesus Alone, a song written prior to Arthur Cave’s passing, seems darkly prophetic: “You fell from the sky, crash-landed in a field near the River Adur,” it runs. Naturally, this is unsettling and not easy to dismiss, but one is also reminded that the agile, grief-stricken mind is hot-wired to find meaning and significance where ultimately there might only be unfortunate coincidence. Further in, the all-consuming Girl In Amber has extraordinary emotional heft. Strings and piano drive its simple, creeping arrangement while Cave’s meandering, ancient-as-Methuselah, weary-as-Job vocal has hitherto unimaginable gravitas. He is, of course, our chief architect of Gothic song, but never has he had building blocks quite like these. Like much of the material here, Girl In Amber retains a certain opacity, but it can be read as an evocation of how time freezes, how everything becomes hyper-real when we lose someone we love. “I knew the world would stop spinning now since you’ve been gone,” sings Cave, and that seems plain enough. Elsewhere, Thomas Wydler’s measured drumming drives I Need You along beautifully, its simple cry for help taking in “that night we wrecked like a train” and “long black cars waiting around.” The album’s poised, Sunday morning-set title-track, meanwhile, grasps for something like transcendence. Despite its stark images of depletion and its acknowledgement that “nothing comes for free”, it fades out on a hopeful refrain: “And it’s all right now.” In One More Time With Feeling, Cave speaks of he and Susie ultimately deciding to be happy as an act of revenge upon their loss; of them resolving to take care of each other, and those closest to them. There are also moving moments where the singer – clearly a changed man – smiles with true benevolence as maybe only those cruelly humbled by bereavement can. There is no obvious analogue to that hard-won resolution in Skeleton Tree’s music, but when Danish Soprano Else Torp takes over the lead vocal on the hymn-like Distant Sky, giving it wings, something is released. With its wash of organ and tranquil vibraphone, Distant Sky feels escapist, something that floats above the visceral core of the album. Yet even here Cave sings: “They told us our dreams would outlive us/ But they lied.” Skeleton Tree is an extraordinary piece of work, one that might impact upon you profoundly if you choose to beddown in its dark corridors of hurt. Despite feeling diminished and incapacitated by unimaginable pain, Cave remains that rare thing: a fiftysomething singer-songwriter who continues to grow in stature with each album.
“AUDIBLY AND OBVIOUSLY, CAVE’S FAITH HAS BEEN SORELY TESTED, BUT NOT DITCHED."