Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Ghosteen
Critic Score
Based on 37 reviews
2019 Ratings: #1 / 805
Year End Rank: #3
User Score
2019 Rank: #33
Liked by 172 people
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CRITIC REVIEWS

100
musicOMH

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.

100
The Irish Times
It’s very hard not to be taken aback by the songs which are among the best Nick Cave has ever recorded.
100
Classic Rock

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.

100
Record Collector
It can only tower when it comes to naming this decade’s great albums; miles above and light years ahead of anything else.
100
The Observer

In the first album wholly written since the death of his son, Cave reaches an extraordinary, sad and beautiful artistic evolution.

100
The Telegraph

A long, sad, brooding mediation on grief, the 17th album from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds is simultaneously their loveliest and most terrible.

100
The Independent

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.

100
Mojo

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.

100
The Guardian

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.

100
NME

‘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.

100
A.V. Club

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.

100
Sputnikmusic

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.

100
The Line of Best Fit

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.

100
Consequence of Sound

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.

93
GIGsoup

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.

90
AllMusic

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.

90
PopMatters

The anguish a parent feels for losing their child is harrowing and Ghosteen masterfully captures Nick Cave's grief and spiraling rumination on mortality.

90
FLOOD Magazine

Everything might be as distant as the stars. But Nick Cave, on Ghosteen, makes empathy and elegy seem so near and touchable.

90
Spectrum Culture

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.

90
Crack Magazine

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.

90
Under the Radar

Ghosteen is an almost supernaturally wonderful record. It is, perhaps, the ultimate Nick Cave album—yet somehow unlike anything he has done before.

90
Uncut

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.

90
Clash

Another open letter straight from artist to audience that cuts right to the core of what means to have loved, lost and loved again.

90
Loud and Quiet

There’s an embarrassment of riches here, and emotional gut punches land hard and fast from the outset.

90
Slant Magazine

On Ghosteen, Cave doesn’t offer any answers, but there’s comfort to be found in keeping the questions open-ended.

90
Rolling Stone

His latest ... seems like a broader, and altogether more stunning reaction to losing his son.

88
Pitchfork

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.

87
Paste

Often, listening to Ghosteen feels like attending a surreal, freewheeling wake.

80
Q Magazine
Gorgeous, grief-stricken LP.
80
Evening Standard
All in all, it’s a lot to process — not lighter but endlessly absorbing.
80
Northern Transmissions
It’s an intriguing, somewhat beguiling listen and, surprise or not, an infinitely beautiful, heartbreaking album that only a master can create.
80
The Arts Desk
The chiselled lyrics of latter-day Cave, the sober working writer, feel illuminated.
80
Gigwise

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.

80
Exclaim!
It's a monolithic record: immense, imposing and impossible to fully comprehend with a single listen.
70
The Needle Drop

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.

70
God Is in the TV

It’s a strange, beautifully bewildering record that I’m finding equally bewildering and enchanting.

ElectricMess
NR

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

gabbygee
95

adults see ghosts

Doofy
85

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.

Schmedess
84

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

87

Death is more touching than it seems.

emergencydog
82

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

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Track List

Part 1: The Children
1Spinning Song
4:43
92
2Bright Horses
4:52
97
3Waiting for You
3:54
94
4Night Raid
5:07
86
5Sun Forest
6:46
92
6Galleon Ship
4:14
91
7Ghosteen Speaks
4:02
89
8Leviathan
4:47
84
Part 2: The Parents
1Ghosteen
12:10
90
2Fireflies
3:23
83
3Hollywood
14:12
91
Total Length: 1 hour, 8 minutes
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Added on: September 23, 2019