Ghosteen

It still vibrates with Warren Ellis's ominous, cosmic-radiation synthesizers and loops, but Ghosteen is less tightly coiled and knotted. ... Cave finds a way to reach out, and reach through. [Dec 2019, p.87]

He sounds simultaneously alone at the edge of the world and surrounded by benevolent spirits, a fittingly biblical cloud of witnesses who haven’t seen the power of God so much as they’ve moved through the fallout of their own atomic blasts; theirs is a communion of radiation. So it’s a bit of a surprise that Ghosteen is also Cave’s most accessible album since The Boatman’s Call.

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.

The biblical book of Hebrews says, “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Never has an album expressed this idea clearer than Ghosteen.

It’s another masterpiece that will forever be enshrined in his ever-growing legacy. Absolute perfection.

Ultimately, all are visions, alternately haunted and comforting. Subtle evolutions in mood and instrumentation come to peaks that are made all the more stunning by their scarcity.

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

A rich, shifting tapestry of grief, beauty, tailspinning disorientation, and illuminating snatches of lucidity.

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. Few mediations on grief manage to navigate despair and catharsis as well as this.

The result is perhaps the most straightforwardly beautiful set of songs that Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds have ever recorded. ... Listening to Ghosteen, it’s very hard indeed not to be taken aback.

An astonishing record.

A richly imagined widescreen masterpiece that grows deeper and more emotive with each listen, Ghosteen may well prove to be the most ambitious, achingly beautiful, boldly experimental album of cave's career. [Dec 2019, p.83]

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

It is raw, but also synthetic. There are a number of very long songs,m verbal rambles, but the music fills in, disturbing the melancholy of Cave's piano with static interruptions that owe as much to cave and Warren's film soundtracks as they do to the Bad Seeds' more conventional songcraft. [Dec 2019, p.18]

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

Ghosteen is a masterpiece of melancholy. You mourn right along with him and hope he finds solace.

Ellis and Cave create an ambient field where all of the ambiguities of grief and hope can exist at once.

Ghosteen is not a blissful or comfortable album, but it is a hopeful one. The gaping wound of ‘Skeleton Tree’ is scarring over as Cave pulls away from the past’s savage undertow, content in the knowledge that peace will come. It’s a paean to how all things bright and beautiful can be thrown into blinding relief once you’ve known real darkness, another open letter straight from artist to audience that cuts right to the core of what means to have loved, lost and loved again.

At a distance, the album can feel like an ambient mood piece with some pretty moments rising from the mist. Listen closely, however, and something changes. The album becomes a meditation on pain and wonder, an apparent duality that Cave’s narrator turns into an acceptance of what it means to live.

You don’t need to be an expert in Cave’s wider cosmology to be swept inside of Ghosteen, to be devastated by its despair and lifted higher by its humanity. You only need the ability to suffer and the desire to survive.

Cave’s decision to deliver this story in a falsetto-laced voice far above his register is somewhat bewildering, but his ultimate conclusion—that “everybody’s losing somebody”—is deeply sound. ... Cave’s radical openness has brought him into conversation and solidarity with this global community of people who have lost and who continue to live. For such people, Ghosteen is a sweeping and remarkable gift.

Unsurprisingly the mood is melancholy and the louche, theatrical sexuality or carnal drama of earlier albums is replaced by a battered and searching tone, striving to make sense, or failing that, some poetry or beauty out of the tragedy. The narratives take on a less devilish tone here. [Nov 2019, p.46]

Cave hasn't played much honest-to-goodness rock & roll in the decade prior to this release, and in its place he's created something that's rich and emotionally potent, and he's truly mastered his own creation.

Gorgeous, grief-stricken LP. [Dec 2019, p.108]

“Ghosteen” is an eerie, somber monolith, a set of 11 songs that stretches over an hour and is grouped on two CDs.