The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Haunted by a ‘runaway flake of snow’
A long, sad, brooding meditation on grief, the 17th album from Nick
Cave and the Bad Seeds is simultaneously their loveliest and most terrible.
There can be little doubt about who the Ghosteen of the title represents. Described by Cave as “a migrating spirit”, he flits through songs just out of reach, a “runaway flake of snow”, a child who climbed “into the sun”.
The death of Nick Cave’s 15-year-old son Arthur in 2015 has become the inescapable centre of his art. Although 2016’s Skeleton Tree was largely composed prior to Arthur’s fall from a Brighton clifftop it was shaped in the aftermath, its subdued soundscapes and Cave’s vocals turning it into a quiet apocalypse of the heart. Ghosteen rises in its devastated wake, with Cave left behind in a dying world: “Everything is distant as the stars/ And I am here and you are where you are.”
The Bad Seeds strip the ambient tones of Skeleton Tree to their barest bones, in amorphous passages of slow, sonorous piano chords, shadowy synths and spectral violins, with wailing choirs moaning in the margins like the bloodless Shades of Homer’s underworld. Everything supports Cave’s battered voice incanting half-spoken verses with weary resignation, occasionally rising to a fragile falsetto. He sums up the listener’s dilemma on
Sun Forest: “It isn’t any fun to be standing here alone with nowhere to be/ With a man mad with grief and on each side a thief/ And everybody hanging from a tree.” This is not for the faint-hearted.
The double album’s first eight songs revolve around the solace of love. Cave’s wife, Susie, is ever-present, his co-traveller in grief, to whom he pledges renewed devotion with phrases as simple as “I love my baby and my baby loves me.”
Album two grapples with the beast itself across three surrealist songs about accepting death. The message is essentially stoic: “Everybody’s always losing someone.” Yet on Ghosteen, contemporary music’s boldest lyricist seems to be questioning whether language can ever be equal to such cataclysmic emotion. “Everyone has a heart and it’s calling for something/ And we’re all so sick and tired of seeing things as they are,” he croons on Bright Horses, but the song depicts his own metaphors collapsing around him. His bright horses are just horses.
People are cruel. The world is run by tyrants and fools. “And the little white shape dancing at the end of the hall/ Is just a wish that time can’t dissolve.”
These songs may be Cave’s attempt to reconnect with a sense of beauty and wonder, but the tone is too uneasy for comfortable resolutions. “It’s a long way to find peace of mind,” Cave sighs at the end, as the backing track warps and falls silent.
The death of Cave’s young son has become the centre of his art