On first listen I thought all the people raving about Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ 16th album needed to get out more.
And way too much emphasis was put on the fact that, some time during the making of the album, Cave’s 15-year-old son Arthur fell to his death.
The resulting record was supposedly “a painful document of love and loss”.
But, while several lyrics were amended by Cave during subsequent recording sessions, most of the album had been written by then. So Skeleton Tree is typical of Cave with its imagery of death, love, blood, loss and uncertainty.
More interesting is how uncomfortably rough around the edges it is. Cave’s lyrics are delivered in spoken word or barely sung, raw, shaky, uncertain.
There is bleak expressionist beauty in the jarring juxtapositions of music —barely a melody, electronic loops — and tension between music and language.
It seems more about coming to terms with change than with grief. An unwelcome, dark awareness, encounters with mundane epiphanies, final reconciliation to an unfeeling universe.
Random lyrics:
All the things we love, we lose.
Let us sit together until the moment comes.
Just breathe.
And let the world turn.
Cause nothing really matters.
“Are you still here?”
