Yes, it can be painful, but there’s a beautiful catharsis contained within Ghosteen that makes it one of the most essential records of recent times – a lifejacket for anyone surfing that dreadful wave of grief.
Ghosteen is an album which raises the bar in terms of lyrical expression, sonic exploration, and even how an album can be released in modern times. Experiencing Ghosteen involves entering another man's world. It’s a world that is both painfully intimate and startlingly alien.
Ghosteen is music that impresses upon the soul.
In the first album wholly written since the death of his son, Cave reaches an extraordinary, sad and beautiful artistic evolution.
A long, sad, brooding mediation on grief, the 17th album from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds is simultaneously their loveliest and most terrible.
Following the traumatised chaos of 2016’s Skeleton Tree, Ghosteen is a warm cloud of ambient solace – a sonic evocation of the communion he has experienced through his newly porous relationship with his audience.
It still vibrates with Warren Ellis's ominous, cosmic-radiation synthesizers and loops, but Ghosteen ... is less tightly coiled and knottef ... Cave finds a way to reach out, and reach through.
On one level, it shouldn’t be surprising that it’s as good as it is ... Nevertheless, listening to Ghosteen, it’s very hard indeed not to be taken aback.
‘Ghosteen’ is one of the most devastatingly accurate accounts of grief that you’ll ever listen to. Yet it’s also, astoundingly, one of the most comforting.
What Cave sends us from this new place is remarkable. Ghosteen is both his most solitary recording since 2001’s No More Shall We Part and impossible to imagine without the contributions of The Bad Seeds.
Ghosteen may be the biggest boon to his mythical career yet; it’s another masterpiece that will forever be enshrined in his ever-growing legacy. Absolute perfection.
Cave has written affectingly about love before, but it’s never felt so profound as this; rather than revelling in love, he is audibly clinging to it for dear life.
The simplicity is mesmerizing, inviting us into meditation as light piano pieces and sparse, melodic lines weave through an omnipresent haze shimmering with feathery light.
A piece of work that’s difficult but hopeful, full of darkness but supplier of enough light to illuminate its every square inch. One that’s gentle yet staggering, beautiful yet devastating.
Ghosteen sounds like the musings of a handful of lost souls, each trapped in their own barren prairie with memories that soothe and ache at once, and its power is overwhelming while the volume is low-key.
The anguish a parent feels for losing their child is harrowing and Ghosteen masterfully captures Nick Cave's grief and spiraling rumination on mortality.
Everything might be as distant as the stars. But Nick Cave, on Ghosteen, makes empathy and elegy seem so near and touchable.
Ghosteen takes years of hurt, sorrow and reflection and releases them in an astonishing double-album, one of the most challenging and most beautiful of Cave’s career.
On Ghosteen Cave seems more vital than ever, a master of his craft who has taken the immense nature of grief and channelled it into an album that burns with beauty.
Ghosteen is an almost supernaturally wonderful record. It is, perhaps, the ultimate Nick Cave album—yet somehow unlike anything he has done before.
The beauty of Ghosteen is the way it inhabits the darkness and still manages to harvest optimism. It is extreme stuff, singular in its design, ruthless in its execution.
Another open letter straight from artist to audience that cuts right to the core of what means to have loved, lost and loved again.
There’s an embarrassment of riches here, and emotional gut punches land hard and fast from the outset.
On Ghosteen, Cave doesn’t offer any answers, but there’s comfort to be found in keeping the questions open-ended.
His latest ... seems like a broader, and altogether more stunning reaction to losing his son.
Forty years into his career, Nick Cave emerges with one of his most powerful albums yet, an endlessly giving and complex meditation on mortality and our collective grief.
Often, listening to Ghosteen feels like attending a surreal, freewheeling wake.
Despite a few questionable experimental moments (that simply make the albums more Bad Seeds-eque) the highlights soar to towering heights, making the piece a triumph.
By virtue of its moving vocal performances and lyricism, Ghosteen is among Nick Cave's finest statements—even if its sound design often leaves something to be desired.
It’s a strange, beautifully bewildering record that I’m finding equally bewildering and enchanting.
EDITED: some heavy personal stuff; just a warning
Here I am typing this up when I should be typing up a Literature essay... Typical me.
I'm honestly amazed. I was surprised to hear we would be getting another Nick Cave album so soon (?) after Skeleton Tree. Honestly, I wouldn't have been too surprised to hear that was to be he and the Bad Seeds' last. However, Ghosteen is here, and it's nothing short of stunning. It picks up right where Skeleton Tree left off in its bare and haunting ... read more
The clouds part on ‘Skeleton Tree’s existential despair and give way to existential acceptance.
This album sounds like the universe smiling, and then blinking, as humanity’s brief moment sparks and fades.
this album came out when I was 14 and I had no way of understanding its appeal. Though through my eventual love of Nick Cave and the "hard times" I would go through over the last five years I continued to return to Ghosteen, as its sadness and sheer beauty validated anything I was feeling at the time. There's something almost tacky about the production of these songs, a radiating wall of compression and 0 flaws in the mix give this supremely utopian aura that I've never experienced ... read more
Ghosteen is often considered a late masterpiece by Nick Cave. There's a good deal of reasons to agree with that. It's deep, intricate, atmospheric and lyrical. That said, I feel slightly at odds with this record due to it having a lot of spoken word elements and generally being not energetic enough. Not a Nick Cave album I would return to.
Best: Bright Horses, Sun Forest, Ghosteen
1 | Spinning Song 4:43 | 92 |
2 | Bright Horses 4:52 | 97 |
3 | Waiting for You 3:54 | 94 |
4 | Night Raid 5:07 | 86 |
5 | Sun Forest 6:46 | 92 |
6 | Galleon Ship 4:14 | 91 |
7 | Ghosteen Speaks 4:02 | 89 |
8 | Leviathan 4:47 | 84 |
1 | Ghosteen 12:10 | 90 |
2 | Fireflies 3:23 | 83 |
3 | Hollywood 14:12 | 91 |
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