Skeleton Tree

Skeleton Tree is untouchable. [Dec 2016, p.108]

It’s the beautifully resigned sound of a failed search for redemption.

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. [Nov 2016, p.84]

From the first note to the last, you’re transported back to a time you lost someone close to you and then retrace the path you traveled as you dealt with it. I doubt this album inspires anyone to pick up a guitar or start a band and the experience it details is too personal to inspire other bands to make a similar album. But, if this isn’t a masterpiece... I don’t know what it is.

Ultimately, Skeleton Tree is the sound of feeling and not expressing sorrow.

The same voice sings the final lines of an album that is no less brilliant, but perhaps less straightforward, than initial reactions suggested: not so much an exploration of grief as an example of how grief overwhelms or seeps into everything--a subtle difference, but a difference nonetheless.

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.

It’s a record of unusual rawness, honesty and intensity.

The result is beautiful, visceral and, predictably, emotionally devastating.

The album is a melancholic masterpiece not for the fainthearted.

No other record released this year will provoke such conflicting emotions in you. Skeleton Tree is both beautiful and harrowing, hard to listen to but even harder to look away from.

No one could have crafted this masterpiece quite like Nick Cave, and the staggering amount of material over his nearly four decade long career doesn’t prepare for what we have here. 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.

No, we haven't heard this Cave before, and though magnetic, emotive and tenderly merciful, one prays for his sake that we never hear it again. [No. 137, p.51]

It feels distasteful to rate so powerful, so raw an album in any aesthetic terms and yet it brilliantly, blackly, radiates life. Skeleton Tree is a work of mourning, yes; a work of reverie, yes; and also an immensely moving attempt to reach out of blackness towards life. [Nov 2016, p.65]

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. [Dec 2016, p.26]

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.

The death enveloping Skeleton Tree doesn't get in the way of his limitless sense of emotional elaboration.

This great unknowing serves as the album’s guiding principle. In Cave’s wounded voice, you hear him grapple in real-time with the incidental prophecies of his lyrics and his need to get the job done.

While it may not be Cave's most accessible album, owing both to the experimental nature of much of the music and the fact that its level of emotional rawness makes it a legitimately uncomfortable listen in places, it may very well be his best.

There is just Nick Cave, stripped to the bone and robbed of a future. It’s impossible to turn away.

Cave fans may nitpick about how this album instrumentally stands against avant-garde classics like Kicking Against the Pricks and Let Love In. But 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.

The album peaks in its second half, with a series of songs in which Cave doesn't just again walk the narrow line between love and death, but ponders whether "nothing really matters anymore."

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. It might not be something that you would play that often given the intensity, but when you do, its emotional impact hits like a ton of bricks.

Death and loss have always been topics mined by Cave, but this may be the most visceral and powerful portrait of those feelings he’s ever painted.

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.

The trademark stridency of “Red Right Hand” or even “Mr Clarinet” is replaced with an altogether more measured and restrained vocal style, and the overall tone of Skeleton Tree is less abrasively didactic one than that of its fifteen predecessors.

Nick Cave’s lyrics have always dealt with love and grief, so while the themes seem more poignant because of his loss, in truth the content isn’t so different. It’s the raw nature of the tracks themselves that hit harder than usual.

Skeleton Tree offers little solace, but as the Bad Seeds’ 16th album, it gives the listener an experience that is unshakable.

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.

This album sounds vast and intimate at the same time, like keenly recorded sketches.

Skeleton Tree shares sonic DNA with its predecessor, 2013’s Push the Sky Away, but there is something inward-facing here, something of the solo, piano Nick Cave, or of The Boatman’s Call.

Skeleton Tree might be, to flip the phrase, a mile deep and an inch wide. The lyrics are often beautiful, and when he can be concrete, Cave conjures unforgettable, living images.

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.

The record resonates with raw, emotional intensity in a stunning way.