- Macabre, maudlin, morose, melancholic. These are all apt words for describing Nick Cave’s music, but after tragedy struck in 2015, with the death of Cave’s teenage son, what words could possibly be fitting to describe the subsequent music of Rock ‘n’ Roll’s king of darkness? The answer arrives in the form of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds grandiose new double album, Ghosteen. As expected, the album is sad — painfully sad, but what is unexpected, is the beauty and hope that pervades it. The final in a trilogy of sorts, beginning with 2011’s Push the Sky Away and followed up by 2016’s Skeleton Tree, Ghosteen can be viewed as an attempt to create closure in more ways than one.
Ghosteen is the first offering from Cave that was crafted entirely after the death of his son. When looking for parallels between this fact and the album’s content, the most obvious one is the title. The record is divided into two parts. The songs on the former, Cave states, “are the children,” and the latter “are their parents.” While this dichotomy isn’t salient musically, the lyrical differences are noticeable due to the themes of mourning with which the later part is laden. In terms of music, the album is sombre and ethereal, replete with oscillating synthesisers and flickering strings. While the timbre is strikingly similar to that of Skeleton Tree, the songs are much less structured, with Cave often eschewing melody for spoken word lyrics. However, there a several piano-based songs that sound like they could have been written by Cave in any era, such as Waiting for You and the eerily beautiful Galleon Ship.
Following the five-minute incantation that is Leviathan, the second half of the release begins with its cinematic title track, slowly billowing out with the sounds of undulating synthesisers. As the music begins to crescendo, Cave begins with a powerfully simple line: “This world is beautiful”. However, this positive affirmation is ephemeral. At about the halfway mark, the track decrescendos and the song becomes starkly plaintive as Cave calls, “Here we go”. The song then takes a further, sombre shift, where Cave describes a moonlit man as things fall apart, “starting with his heart”. Then, in one of the most affecting passages in the album, Cave leans on a familiar fairy-tale where, “The three bears watch the TV / They age a lifetime O Lord / Mama Bear holds the remote / Papa Bear he just floats / And Baby Bear he is gone / To the moon in a boat”. Following a brief spoken word song, the album closes with the devastating Hollywood. Like the title track, Hollywood is broken up into two parts with the latter again being more sorrowful. Here, Cave reiterates the Buddhist story of Kisa Gotami, who asks the Buddha to save her dying son. The Buddha then tells Kisa that he will save her son if she collects a mustard seed from a house where no one had died. Kisa goes to every house in the village but isn’t able to collect a single mustard seed. As Kisa buries her child in the forest, Cave laments the ubiquity of death before crying out, “I’m just waiting now for peace to come”. It is a commanding conclusion to an album unmatched in its sadness and beauty.
- Jon Cloumassis.