In Andrew Dominik’s uncomfortably riveting documentary One More Time With Feeling – about the making of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ 16th album – the singer describes a terrible event, which has become omnipresent. “Time is elastic. We can go away from the event but at some point the elastic snaps and we always come back to it.”
That event, of course, was the death last July of his 15-year-old son, Arthur, after he fell from a cliff. Cave has attempted to deal with his family’s grief in the only way he knows. Thus, Skeleton Tree is a musical response to the unimaginable horror; while the recording sessions began before Arthur’s death – much of the writing was completed beforehand – it’s hard not to hear the album as reflecting Cave’s emotional pile-up of shock, confusion and personal disintegration, especially in the intensity of the performances that postdate the tragedy. It’s a record of unusual rawness, honesty and intensity. Where the pre-trauma, far more private Cave would have honed lyrics, shrouded meanings, tidied things up in mix or postproduction, Skeleton Tree has been largely left as it was born, mistakes and all, as an instinctive howl from the heart and gut.
The documentary sees Cave fretting that he should have strengthened his voice before entering the studio. However, as with, say, the dying Johnny Cash’s version of Nine Inch Nails’ Hurt, the frailties, wounds and vulnerabilities in his voice give the record its strength and humanity.
There aren’t many, if any, precedents, but Eric Clapton’s 1991 song Tears in Heaven was written in response to the death of his four-year-old son, Conor, also from a fall. But where Clapton found some comfort in ideas of heavenly reunions and eventual peace, Cave finds no such salvation or solution. In fact, one of Skeleton Tree’s most powerful statements is its rejection of God and notions of easy healing, happy endings or even meaning.
This is, unsurprisingly, a very dark record, which captures a sort of post-traumatic stress disorder in which the Cave no longer knows what he will think from one moment to the next, vomits in the bathroom sink, sees bags growing under his eyes and for whom everyday mundanities have become a frightening ordeal: “Oh, the urge to kill somebody was basically overwhelming. I had such hard blues down there in the supermarket queues.” However, there is also beauty, empathy and love as it veers between bewildered numbness and heartbreaking profundity.
Some songs, such as brooding opener Jesus Alone, were written before events changed the album irrevocably, which makes the song’s sledgehammer first line – “You fell from the sky, crash-landed in a field near the River Adur” – shockingly prophetic. Nothing is ducked here; everything is bared or confronted and Cave’s agonised plea – “With my voice I am calling you”, over a background of industrial noise and wounded bird cries – makes for a powerful opener.
At times, as on Rings of Saturn, Skeleton Key is almost pretty, but with a black undercurrent: that song views the inevitability of death and cruelty through the metaphor of a venomous insect. The plangent, synth-and-piano-led Girl in Amber is deceptively beautiful, but delivers a succession of blows as fleeting memories (“You kneel, lace up his shoes your little blue-eyed boy”) are swept away by the enormity of loss: “I knew the world would stop spinning now since you’ve been gone / I used to think that when you died you kind of wandered the world / I don’t think that any more.”
Anthrocene has echoes of the Doors’ Horse Latitude – it’s an angry collage of sound whipped into a frenzy by an unforgiving, raging vocal – but some of the album’s best moments tap into the almost transcendently eerie calm that follows grief. I Need You is astonishingly gorgeous: a song from a numb void where emotion has been drained but love flickers like a faraway spark. In the duet Distant Sky, Else Torp offers a fleeting solace in heightened senses and the new joys of the world around, before Cave shatters the peace with furious devastation: “They told us our gods would outlive us, but they lied.” Some moments – the singer’s cry over the sea in the title track, to be met by an empty echo – are almost too personal to bear, and it’s hard to know who exactly he addresses in the album’s final line, “And it’s all right now.”
Skeleton Tree will take its place in the racks alongside Justin Bieber or whoever, where it will sit like a gaping open wound. It will prove scant consolation to the singer that the worst kind of trauma has produced a piece of art that will surely prove unforgettable to all who hear it.
