Reviewed by: Michael McKinney
Score: 8/10
Nick Cave is badly shaken. That much is obvious within the first thirty seconds of Skeleton Tree: a single, fuzzed-out pedal tone, pulsing in and out, never quite settling down; a wobbling, crying synth; strings that accentuate rather than alleviate the mood. The first lyric on the record is about jarring transitions, but told in a way that suggests a dull pain, a grey-eyed stoicism: “You fell from the sky / Crash-landed in a field near the river Adur.” It’s a positively dreary track, one that brings up all sorts of characters – a man covered in others’ blood, a woman surrounded by hummingbirds, an old man sitting by the fire. He beckons for each, pulling them towards an undefined goal. But the part that stands out the most is how mundane it all seems to Cave: these are descriptions recited, not lives told. It’s bleary stuff, with senses of both dread and listlessness.
In July of 2015, Arthur, Nick Cave’s 15-year-old son, died after falling off a cliff in Brighton, England. Nick didn’t want to – couldn’t bear to – talk to the press about it, so he instead recorded a documentary, a two-hour-long interview on his own terms. A day before Skeleton Tree was released, One More Time with Feeling premiered in cinemas around the world. It sees Cave both re-recording vocal cuts and talking about his inability to grasp Arthur’s demise; it’s a movie less about death than it is about living after it. You can see this in the way Cave calls it a “trauma,” with any specifics delayed until over an hour in – it seems like Cave doesn’t want to think about his son’s passing. But try as he may to work around it, it won’t leave. Death, then, is the shadow hanging over Nick Cave in both One More Time with Feeling and Skeleton Tree. All of a sudden, those initial lyrics – about someone falling from the sky and crash-landing near a river close to his home – snap into focus. Apathy is replaced with aimlessness; dread with defeat; melancholy with mourning.
The end product is a stark album, one about dealing with a loss that will never truly settle. And, just as importantly, it’s an uncompromisingly personal one: it often feels like you aren’t meant to hear it, like these were tracks for Cave to spill his guts over and move on from. For much of the record he sounds out of sync, numb: muttering about losing things he loves, or about resisting urges to kill people that wish him well, or about death and God and creations and memories. That gloom runs throughout the release, and the band reacts accordingly, creating drones and dins and pulses. Much of the playing works in hushed tones, making tape hiss and miles-away cymbal hits and metallic creaks feel immediate and foreboding. Synths wander, with no clear beginning or end; choirs sing, specters removed from their surroundings; drums fade into the background, reduced to a faint rumble. The group gradually builds up momentum as the album goes on, with the ending being undeniably more direct than the opener, but make no mistake: by and large, these are washed-out tracks, offering something closer to a textural experience than a foundation.
And Cave understands this: he sings atop the instrumentation, but rarely precisely lines up. For a good number of the songs here, he seems to persist despite what’s going on around him; synths whirl atop beds of drums and guitar, while Cave whispers and cries and sings. He may be the most solid thing here, given the instrumentation’s translucency – but even he fades in and out, his voice moving from a croak to a conversational tone to a pained falsetto, always in a husky baritone. On a purely musical level, he feels detached from the sounds happening under him; he’s floating over them, only occasionally glancing down in his thoughts. He’s the only distinctly human character here – whenever other voices join the haze, it comes as a shock; when the drumming accelerates, even it is ignored, washed behind layers of synth pulses and piano and distant choirs; mood, rather than melody, dominates. He sounds truly alone here, with the rest of the world trying to reach for him but finding his back turned and head low. It’s a compelling, if painful, image.
But it’s also a beautiful one, even if that beauty is hidden beneath layers of grief. “Distant Sky” sees Cave and Danish Soprano Else Torp in a duet, with Torp urging them to leave and Cave struggling to forget: they both mention leaving for the “distant skies,” but he delivers one of the heaviest lines of the record, voice shaking: “They told us our gods would outlive us / But they lied.” Nevertheless, he sounds like he’s moved on, or at least wants to; he’s ready to keep living, even though it’s still a challenge. The title track continues this catharsis, proving to be one of the most direct numbers on the record: a gorgeous bed of piano, calm drumming, and guitar that strums rather than drones. It finds Cave attempting to make peace with tragedy, this time with a steadier hand. But it’s still the sound of a father trying to reassure himself in any way he can, no matter how temporary. He calls for his son, hearing nothing in response. When he says that “it’s alright now,” it comes off as afraid yet solemn, fragile yet calm.
Near the end of “I Need You,” Cave chokes out a single line – “Just breathe.” It’s a painful moment, one that shows Cave at his most vulnerable and open, his most ragged. It’s hard to tell if he’s begging his son to wake up or trying to regain his composure. That may not be the most important part, however: either way, this shows Cave staring death in the face and cracking. This is a record of a man at his lowest point, one full of fear and doubt and numbness. But it’s, notably, an honest one: it would be simple to tell a story of suffering that ended in victory, but this one instead resides in blacks and muted grays throughout, shying away from a fully satisfying conclusion. Skeleton Tree’s overarching message may be its simplest: Grief never quite leaves; instead, you simply learn to live with it.
FCC: Clean
RIYL: The Birthday Party, Tom Waits, Sun Kil Moon, Red House Painters
Favorite Tracks: 3, 4, 6, 7
