Additional information
Personnel: Nick Cave (vocals, piano, Wurlitzer organ, synthesizer, vibraphone, background vocals); George Vjestica (acoustic guitar, background vocals); Warren Ellis (tenor guitar, baritone guitar, violin, viola, piano, Wurlitzer organ, synthesizer, loops, background vocals); Ellie Wyatt (violin); Charlotte Glasson (viola); Joe Giddey (cello); James Sclavunos (vibraphone, tubular bells, percussion, background vocals); Thomas Wydler (drums). Audio Mixers: Jake Jackson ; James Sclavunos; Kevin Paul; Nick Cave; Warren Ellis. Recording information: La Frette; The Retreat. Photographer: Alwin Kuchler. Nick Cave is an artist who has never shied away from exploring the darker side of the human experience, often in broadly gothic strokes on his early albums but with a growing degree of nuance and compassion as Cave and his work matured. But a very real and deeply painful tragedy was visited on Cave while he was working on his 16th solo album, Skeleton Tree. His 15-year-old son Arthur Cave died when he fell from a cliff in July 2015, and while the writing and recording was already underway when the youngster suffered his accident, the grief and pain of loss Cave felt is palpable throughout this album. Skeleton Tree is relatively modest in scale -- it runs just 40 minutes, the cover artwork is minimal, and the music lacks the dramatic, grand-scale arrangements of Cave's albums of the 21st century. Nearly all of these songs feature spare, minimal melodies and low-key soundscapes that hover over beds of atonal electronic noise and sculpted static. And while the estimable talents of the Bad Seeds are on display here, on many tracks the final effect feels more like an author reading over ambient backing tracks than the sort of evocative sounds one might expect from Cave and his collaborators. The lyrics appear to reference Cave's personal loss on occasion -- the very first words in the opening track, "Jesus Alone," are "You fell from the sky/Crash landed in a field," which could hardly be a mere coincidence -- yet Skeleton Tree doesn't feel like an album about the late Arthur Cave. Instead, Skeleton Tree plays like an act of mourning, a set of songs in which Cave makes his acquaintance with grief and struggles to make sense of the pain and emotional devastation that come with outliving your child. As always, Cave's songs are both literate and emotionally honest, and though this music is genuinely passionate, he avoids histrionics. Skeleton Tree isn't about exorcizing the agony of being robbed of a loved one. Instead, this music honors the dead by making sense of the pain of the survivors, and the harrowing and beautiful "Distant Sky" (a duet with Else Torp) finds a point where these two sides meet and find peace. 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. ~ Mark Deming
Reviews
Rolling Stone - 4 stars out of 5 -- "Here is the dean of literary gothic song-craft, a master of wordplay, symbolism and irony, baring his soul like never before." Magnet - "At times, the music seems so weighty there could be nothing heavier. At others, it lifts and soars, pulled up and aloft by Cave's voice, here so restrained, so measured and so stately." Paste (magazine) - "SKELETON TREE strips down embellishments and brings to the forefront sinister bass lines and a synthesizer that will widen the tear in your heart a little more with every note, especially on the ephemeral 'Distant Sky.'" Clash (Magazine) - "Each of the eight tracks present on SKELETON TREE is a gaping wound, a chink in Cave's hardened carapace that is able to let out a little of the churning ink inside."
