On Skeleton Tree, the Bad Seeds sound shattered, barely capable of holding themselves together.
As from an unspeakable event a remarkable record has come. One that sits amongst Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ best. Skeleton Tree is full of grief, but full of heart too.
By any yardstick, Skeleton Tree is a staggering achievement, the one for which Nick Cave will always be remembered.
Even by Cave's dour standards, Skeleton Tree is a tough listen, but it's also a powerful and revealing one, and a singular work from a one-of-a-kind artist.
This is not an album for the rest of us; it’s a reflex reaction to a torment most people will thankfully never have to endure. It goes back to that old instinct of self-preservation: just as a shark must keep moving, so an artist must keep working, even in the face of unimaginable loss.
Skeleton Tree is the sound of feeling and not expressing sorrow. It’s something unexplainable, a feeling you can’t quite place into words when you’re still decompressing.
It can be a sad, sometimes harrowing journey, though never less than compelling.
Skeleton Tree is an extraordinary piece of work, one that might impact upon you profoundly if you choose to bed-down in its dark corridors of hurt.
Skeleton Tree is meant to be a record for everyone, a naked, honest depiction of true grief in musical form ... This stands as possibly his greatest achievement, as much a sorrowful exploration as a loving sendoff only for his fans, but more importantly, for himself.
What is mined here is an exhaustive yet cathartic coalescence of one of the toughest human emotions as musical art. An astounding achievement.
Emotional, stunning, dense and fractured. Skeleton Tree represents art as healing and artist as mirror.
Skeleton Tree is unquestionably a document of staggering loss. But it’s also a testament to the beautiful ways in which human beings bind together in the direst of moments.
The songs are pillowed by vaporous electronic backing that recalls the slow-moving, aquatic drift of Push The Sky Away and the sonic explorations of Cave and Ellis' Minimalist Soundtracks.
Skeleton Tree brings you in and lets you find a path of your choosing and it will let you live with, or move on from this album when it is the right moment to. But you will be marked by it.
When real, life-changing tragedy strikes a master of dark musical arts, masterpieces can be made: Lou Reed and John Cale’s Songs For Drella. Bowie’s Blackstar. Sufjan Stevens’s Carrie & Lowell. The Bad Seeds’ sixteenth album, Skeleton Tree.
Simultaneously eulogy, love song, and meditation on trauma, it often feels like Cave is grasping for air, especially near the midpoints of the album, where the sadness seems almost insurmountable.
Like this year’s other great death-infused masterpiece, David Bowie’s Blackstar, Cave’s latest is both an avant-garde benediction and a striking push forward for a constantly advancing artist.
There are no more stories on ‘Skeleton Tree’, no more fascinating tragedies designed to inflame the imagination. There is just Nick Cave, stripped to the bone and robbed of a future. It’s impossible to turn away.
Cave and the Bad Seeds have been responsible for a lot of great albums, but nothing they've ever released matches Skeleton Tree's sonic cohesion, consistent front-to-back quality, or gut-level resonance.
Whether we want to explore grief or learn to live with it, Skeleton Tree provides a sagacious guidebook.
Skeleton Tree ... isn’t something listeners can likely dislodge from their minds anytime soon ... There’s something to be said about Skeleton Tree and its starkness, which is as familiar as life and death, an elegy, and a hell of a thing to forget.
This is music so alive, real, raw, and occasionally frightening, that it forces you into its grip for its almost 40 minute running time, refusing to let you go.
Throughout the record, Cave moves in and out of focus, though always clearly to his own ends ... As an artist, he needed to release the record in just this way in order to process his pain. Skeleton Tree was released for us, but it’s for him.
Another solid example of why after so many years, this band is still continuing to make music that can be many things, whether filled with anger, sadness, or in your face aggression and swagger. Give it a listen, but make sure you don’t have anything to do the rest of the day.
It is impossible – unnecessary – to tease out what was written before and after the event, but what is immediately striking is that Skeleton Tree isn’t actually all that different from your pre-existing idea of a latter-day Cave album.
Skeleton Tree is beyond brave. It’s a raw, frank, open wound of a record and you get the impression that, far from Cave having to force himself to write and record these songs, on the contrary it’s the only way he knows how to deal with the grieving process, and he frequently falls over himself in a rush to get the words out.
On much of Skeleton Tree, it sounds as though the Bad Seeds are doing their best to stay out of their frontman's way. It's an album of pure, direct emotion.
Although Cave still writes safely from the perspective of characters on Skeleton Tree's eight songs, the grief on each track is undeniably and uniquely his own.
Skeleton Tree is one of the most apt examples of a man's grief being put to wax that anyone could imagine.
Never hesitant to reach into the depths of himself and his times, this is his deepest journey yet, his own katabasis and nekyia – Cave's journey to the underworld to speak with the dead.
‘Skeleton Tree’ fractures genres and style, but always seems to snap back to that sense of fragility. By keeping things stripped back Nick Cave might have created his most open album to date.
Skeleton Tree offers little solace, but as the Bad Seeds’ 16th album, it gives the listener an experience that is unshakable.
In the canon of Bad Seeds albums Skeleton Tree is immensely difficult to pin down. With my Cave fandom hat on I cannot help but feel this is a noticeably inferior record to its immediate predecessor, and one that is less powerful on early listens than the likes of Tender Prey, The Boatman’s Call or the chronically underrated No More Shall We Part.
Nick Cave may have acquired a reputation for delving into those dark and frightening places at various times over the last forty years but Skeleton Tree is definitely the real thing and a more brutally honest reflection of the worst of possible times would be a rare find.
I just want to listen to this in a sensory deprivation chamber. Or listen to this while floating in space. Or be in the heart of a volcano, whether it be an active or dormant one, with this playing through my headphones.
I want to listen to this in the dark. I don't want to see anything, I just want this to fill my ears. Fill my head. And I want to be alone.
I
Goddamn.
This is beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. One of the darkest albums I’ve heard, but somehow manages to find beauty in it. However distant sky is just pretty good.
Haunting, enchanting, poetic, unsettling, and simply beautiful. Nick Cave’s deep and aged voice adds so much emotion and reality to this truly depressing project that’s filled with love. It’s so hard to stomach the story behind this, and the imagery used throughout was truly touching, with many references to family, people, nature, and life itself. It’s definitely not gonna be something I’ll listen to often, as it’s a lot to take in, but it’ll ... read more
Not my cup of tea. I went into this expecting more stuff like what is in Kicking Against the Pricks and found myself immersed in a formless, non-cohesive soundscape with uninspiring vocals. Some lyrics are really well thought out, tho. But that doesn't make up for the fact that I was expecting something else and had a bad surprise.
1 | Jesus Alone 5:52 | 94 |
2 | Rings of Saturn 3:28 | 91 |
3 | Girl in Amber 4:51 | 93 |
4 | Magneto 5:22 | 91 |
5 | Anthrocene 4:34 | 90 |
6 | I Need You 5:58 | 93 |
7 | Distant Sky 5:36 | 94 |
8 | Skeleton Tree 4:01 | 95 |
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