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CRITIC REVIEWS
100
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
It’s very hard not to be taken aback by the songs which are among the best Nick Cave has ever recorded.
100
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
It can only tower when it comes to naming this decade’s great albums; miles above and light years ahead of anything else.
100
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
Ghosteen is music that impresses upon the soul.
100
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 simplicity is mesmerizing, inviting us into meditation as light piano pieces and sparse, melodic lines weave through an omnipresent haze shimmering with feathery light.
100
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
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
‘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
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
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
In the first album wholly written since the death of his son, Cave reaches an extraordinary, sad and beautiful artistic evolution.
100
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.
93
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
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
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
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
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
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
His latest ... seems like a broader, and altogether more stunning reaction to losing his son.
90
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
Ghosteen is an almost supernaturally wonderful record. It is, perhaps, the ultimate Nick Cave album—yet somehow unlike anything he has done before.
90
Everything might be as distant as the stars. But Nick Cave, on Ghosteen, makes empathy and elegy seem so near and touchable.
90
On Ghosteen, Cave doesn’t offer any answers, but there’s comfort to be found in keeping the questions open-ended.
90
There’s an embarrassment of riches here, and emotional gut punches land hard and fast from the outset.
88
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
Often, listening to Ghosteen feels like attending a surreal, freewheeling wake.
80
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
It's a monolithic record: immense, imposing and impossible to fully comprehend with a single listen.
80
It’s an intriguing, somewhat beguiling listen and, surprise or not, an infinitely beautiful, heartbreaking album that only a master can create.
80
All in all, it’s a lot to process — not lighter but endlessly absorbing.
80
The chiselled lyrics of latter-day Cave, the sober working writer, feel illuminated.
6mo
70
It’s a strange, beautifully bewildering record that I’m finding equally bewildering and enchanting.
70
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.
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.
Back at the end of 2019, I played this album to my dad, because I was really in love with it. My dad never cries or anything like that, but this album got him. Even if he didn't understand English, the sound of the record was powerful enough to evoke an emotion.
I obviously didn't review this back then, because I wasn't on AOTY, but I also couldn't review it without listening to it again multiple times, because my memory is completely shattered lol. Now that I've finally gotten through it ... read more
Contributions By
patton, indiegalaxy10, Alejandro González, MusicXXY, Gupla, maksym26, Pacaveli, dearsongs, jonathanathan, domvic, anztec, Orangedroog65, wless, DayIsDone, owenthinks, Muratka, OPENblinds, Sam Is Not A Critic, SeenYourVideo, JoaoSantosBecome a Donor
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Track List
Disc 1
| 1 | Spinning Song 4:43 | 93 |
| 2 | Bright Horses 4:52 | 97 |
| 3 | Waiting for You 3:54 | 94 |
| 4 | Night Raid 5:07 | 89 |
| 5 | Sun Forest 6:46 | 94 |
| 6 | Galleon Ship 4:14 | 93 |
| 7 | Ghosteen Speaks 4:02 | 92 |
| 8 | Leviathan 4:47 | 85 |
Disc 2
| 1 | Ghosteen 12:10 | 95 |
| 2 | Fireflies 3:23 | 87 |
| 3 | Hollywood 14:12 | 93 |
Total Length: 1 hour, 8 minutes
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| #1 | / | MOJO |
| #1 | / | musicOMH |
| #1 | / | The Observer: Kitty Empire |
| #1 | / | The Skinny |
| #2 | / | Fopp |
| #2 | / | MondoSonoro |
| #2 | / | OOR |
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Added on: September 23, 2019