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The new album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds was casually announced a week before its release, in response to a fan's question on the Red Hand Files website, a window of communication with his audience that the Australian singer updates weekly.
Towards the light
Laconic and gnomically flavored were the words with which he presented this new work: “The songs of the first album are the children. The songs of the second album are the parents. Ghosteen is a migrating spirit.”
In this work, the singer-songwriter seems to reach the end of a laborious and heartrending purification journey undertaken following the tragic disappearance of his fifteen-year-old son, who fell from a cliff in July 2015.
Cave seems committed to exploring that shadowy area between life and death in constant search of a cathartic elaboration of tragedy, which resides in the acceptance of the universality of death. Not surprisingly, in Hollywood, the sumptuous track with Scott Walker-like orchestral arrangements that concludes Ghosteen, the Buddhist-derived story of Kisa Gotami that speaks of the impermanence of human existence is evoked. “We crawl on our wounds,” he sings, “and now I'm just waiting for my time to come, just waiting for my place in the sun, just waiting for peace to come.”
Cave has spoken about how his son's death has changed his work, how he found a way to “compose beyond his personal traumas to venture into a new dimension, almost a state of wonder.” And despite the appearance of Cave's usual themes, Ghosteen seems to represent this process.
In this regard, Liborio Conca in his review on minima&moralia compares the album to two other records that deal with mourning in the history of auteur rock: Lou Reed, with Magic and Loss, and Mount Eerie, or singer-songwriter Phil Elverum, with A Crow Looked At Me. Conca writes: “Nick Cave – does not do better, does not do worse, that's not the point – takes a step further and inscribes Ghosteen in another dimension; it is as if he has created a new world, and for this, Ghosteen is an album destined to become a classic, a work we will have to reckon with.”
The conquest of essentiality
Everything here seems brought back to the essential and to a rarefied and ethereal sound language that takes the style inaugurated in the two previous albums to the extreme. With the rhythmic part eliminated, the arrangements curated by Warren Ellis rely on electronic carpets and almost prog-like analog synthesizers. Ghosteen appears as an infinitely more conciliatory and sweeter brother of 2016's Skeleton Tree. While that album forced its most beautiful melodies to cautiously make their way through mined fields of explosive and haunting sound and dissonant soundscapes, here a sound fabric held together by soft and minimalistic harmonies is found. Cave's voice, in the meantime, sounds richer. In an age when singers tend to lose part of their vocal range, Cave seems to be acquiring it; just listen to the notes he reaches in The Spinning Song, where the shadow of the forever beloved Elvis Presley hovers.
To the sublimation and concentration of musical language, there is a counterpoint of poetic density and a visionary and surreal depth of lyrics that blend the usual biblical references, the figure of Jesus frequently reoccurrs, with literary sparks that echo closely William Butler Yeats, Sylvia Plath, and William Blake. To visions of galleons sailing the seas to dock in the sky, images of trains interpreted in a gospel key as a means of travel to the afterlife, fantasies of light-soaked forests, iridescent horses, and butterflies alternate with the fairy-tale dimension evoked by the magnificent title track that reprises the British tale Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Here, a poignant and surreal vignette is composed with Mama Bear holding the remote, Papa Bear relaxing while the little bear cub has gone to the moon on a boat. “There is nothing wrong with loving something that you can’t hold in your hand, sitting on the bed smoking and shaking your head,” sings Cave, trying to find meaning in the pain, in the seemingly inconsolable loss, delivering one of his most beautiful and intense albums, which to call a masterpiece doesn’t seem exaggerated.
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Other reviews
By astoria
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.
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.
By Ashbringer83
Some records are doors, gateways into universes that you only know by hearsay or by having read something.
"It's like a door that Cave himself wanted to open, a purification journey that touches everything... It speaks of grief and the loss of a son, but it goes beyond that, it is processing and searching for something to move forward."
By Elizium
No one wants to see your performances anymore; it’s time to hold a child in your arms, to start a different race, a flight.
Warren Ellis, his faithful sonic architect, mischievous wizard who bridges the pain with the Elysian fields.
