NICK CAVE - Skeleton Tree

It would be a mistake to believe that "Skeleton Tree", the sixteenth studio album by the Ink King Nick Cave, is a concept album or a song cycle about the death of his fifteen-year-old son Arthur Cave, who fell from a cliff near Brighton in 2015, likely under the influence of hallucinogens. It is, first and foremost, a para-musical transcription of the coherent, dignified silence the author has maintained, sheltered from any easy spotlight, turned only toward a dialogue with his own grief. On a more personal level, it's a dedication to his very being, a test of how those murder ballads change when aimed - for once - at himself rather than at parables of the dispossessed. The Australian bard has as predecessors two artists who lived through similar tragedies and who produced works stylistically at opposite poles, Eliane Radigue (the "Trilogie De La Mort") and Eric Clapton ("Tears In Heaven"). His artistic result is, ideally, an intersection of the two (albeit, of course, still oriented toward tonal song form).

His vow of renunciation of the visceral guts of "From Her To Eternity" and "Firstborn Is Dead" is by now well known. "Skeleton Tree", however, goes a little further, bringing to completion the register of impalpability begun with the still rather intangible "Push The Sky Away" (2013). "Anthrocene" and "Skeleton Tree" here are new streams of consciousness built on drifting masses of sound, stirred by an ethereal fever.

The unifying center, though, is still always the grief, so overwhelming that it dissolves any sense of poeticizing, with rhetoric as its only handhold: Cave sings in tears and presses the synthesizer keys as if it were a cathedral organ on "I Need You", and on "Jesus Alone" he drowns one of his declaimed rosaries in a cold pool of strings and feedback. And yet it's still practically a pop ditty compared to the leaden rarefaction of "Magneto".

If "Rings Of Saturn" could stand as the first example of a personal flirtation with hip-hop, its mood remains shadowed, even hollowed out. And yet it's still basically a rave party compared to a "Distant Sky" built on an absolute vacuum, in which Cave, almost unable to bear the mourning any longer, hands the microphone over to the exquisitely measured soprano of Else Torp, while listening to "Girl In Amber" is like respectfully staring at the epitaph of an acquaintance.

The sound (human, no longer cursed) of a burnt-out star, symbolized by a faint song because it is truly broken. It's a static harmonic form that spins in place; it implodes rather than explodes, proceeding through obsessive accumulation. Cave relies on macabre pulses rather than tones: calling them crepuscular wouldn't even come close. The Bad Seeds - with a new departure, Barry Adamson - fall into line and, in doing so, all but vanish into a shattered psyche, reduced to a semi-electronic ectoplasm driven by an increasingly factotum Warren Ellis, little more than an aura set to notes that, here and there, becomes a small gem of ambient artistry. The apocalyptic dark undercurrent foreshadowed since the start of his career, if it has indeed arrived, sounds like a private dismay that doesn't frighten - if anything, it embarrasses. It comes accompanied by the documentary on the making of "One More Time With Feeling" (its title taken from a line in "Magneto"), directed by trusted collaborator Andrew Dominik and premiered at the 2016 edition of the Venice Film Festival, a follow-up to the biopic "20.000 Days On Earth" (2014) and to three soundtracks made with Ellis ("West Of Memphis", "Loin Des Hommes", "Hell Or Highwater").

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11/09/2016