Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
Ghosteen

I have long approached everything Nick Cave does with skepticism. The problem is that everything is self-referential, and this is clearly a more or less conscious choice that has ended up making it a kind of iconographic representation, a performance of himself or what he pretends to want to be or wants us to think he is. But where is the difference between all these possibilities? Whatever it is, it is too subtle to be grasped, and in the end, it is not up to us to analyze the reasons, nor to judge the man, as he would indeed like us to do, while I think it is fair to judge only his artistic work.

Of course, it is difficult, when commenting on the album in question, not to fall into forced rhetoric and think about the tragedy that befell him in his personal life four years ago, a theme already thoroughly explored in the previous album ("Skeleton Tree," 2016), which was his best album in recent years, a real jolt in the flatness of his most recent artistic productions.

There is very likely a before and after in Nick Cave's life and artistic production, and it could not be otherwise because there is always a before and after, and a dramatic event constitutes a watershed. However, focusing on this aspect ends up having something "morbid" about it, and that would not be right, so let us limit ourselves to saying that "Ghosteen" (Ghosteen Ltd.) can be considered a justified continuation of the previous album, but not necessarily—and here is the point of the matter—does it maintain the same quality level.

On the contrary, if with "Skeleton Tree" Nick Cave had renewed his sound by introducing elements of electronic and ambient music, the extensive use of drum machines and loops, while not denying his rock and roll and blues roots, and had surprised by effectively laying bare himself as wanting to find himself again, here he falls once more into a form of self-celebratory ritual that, together with a further push towards types of sound already thoroughly explored in the previous chapter, results in a monochromatic album, despite the thousand colors of the cover image, and monotonous, where the centrality and perhaps even the beauty of the lyrics is the repetition of a theatricality that is nothing more than aesthetic.

This here is not a blues music album because Nick Cave no longer has that sacred fire burning inside him: he is a whining and wounded man. He divides his album into one part dedicated to children and another to parents, doing so almost in a biblical manner, as if he wanted to put things in order solely with writing, but things are more difficult than that. The first part contains eight tracks that are practically all identical: I can't delve into the lyrics, the sounds are objectively unpleasant and ineffective, and the increasingly central role of Warren Ellis in the Bad Seeds has ended up wearing out its spirit (the group, in fact, after the departures of Blixa and Mick Harvey, no longer has any reason to exist). The only interesting thing is that "Waiting For You" somehow recalls the theme of Neil Young's "Philadelphia," but it does not have the same expressive strength at all.

The second part is more "experimental," so to speak, to the point that someone has talked about new age in a way I would call improper and misleading. It consists, in fact, of three essentially instrumental tracks, including two long compositions of over ten minutes ("Ghosteen" and "Hollywood"): the mood is deeply dramatic, one gropes and stumbles in a valley of despair without understanding why. There is no genuine message that one wants to share with the listener, there is no sense of "community," which also has its own meaning even in forms of ecclesiastical rituals, like those he wants to evoke with the excessive use of synthesizers and objectively tasteless choirs. All that is heard here is a lonely man, and this is very ugly, but the worst thing is not so much this as the fact that this status is also elected to a sort of necessary process and put on display as if it were a work of art. It doesn't work like that: Nick Cave tries to play the part of Marina Abramovic and exalt what is the mortification of the flesh, but those who mortify are complicit, and I am not in agreement.