The methodology prescribed by @Tiggerlion requires 6 close listens before forming a view. Here’s the inverse. 2 casual unfocussed listens doing other stuff, walking in and out etc.
I’m wary as I made a wrong call on Skeleton Tree, bagging it initially, but this sounds like Skeleton Tree lite. I can even hear some of those exact sounds from that album.
Impression? Unlike the fawning Guardian review linked to here, I found it boring, this whole soundtrack side career has really taken over. It’s the Cave Ellis show and the Bad Seeds must have been bored senseless.
DFB wrote on the release of Skeleton Tree, the guitar-based Seeds are gone forever. Perhaps so, but this layered ambient stuff is heading towards bland. Yes there are some good lyrics but when I walk into the room and here Nick’s sonorous, bordering on mannered voice singing about the three bears “Mama bear holds the remote, papa bear he just floats / And baby bear, he has gone to the moon in a boat, on a boat.” Well, I just cringed a little.
Other opinions?
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/oct/05/nick-cave-and-the-bad-seeds-ghosteen-review
I listened to it on the back of the gushing Alex Petridis review. Rarely have I heard a record so monotonously sombre. It’s a mood piece, perhaps similar in tone to something from Bill Fay or Current 93, but Cave is far too arch and mannered for this stuff to really find a footing. And there is absolutely nothing to lighten the gloom. He never even thinks of opening the curtains. Clearly a work of immense personal significance, it feels like a private lament.
There is no shame in that Junior. I haven’t heard Ghosteen yet and I’m not sure I want to. I found Skeleton Tree beautiful on the sixth listen but I haven’t gone back there since September 2016.
I play it occasionally but certainly not one of my go to Seeds albums.
I enjoyed the first listen. Not so much the second. Haven’t given it a third yet. I suspect as Martin Hairnet points out, it is a mood piece .. and correspondingly I haven’t felt in the mood to give it another crack. Some of the lyrics are very moving/evocative but I suspect it won’t be one of my most played for 2019. May dip in and out if the melancholy moves me to do so.
It’s magnificent.
I’m trying to write a review for it, but it’s too much, too soon, [too soon].
I’m not skilled enough to express what I feel when I play this album.
It’s magnificent is all I can manage just now.
Oh, and I think that Guardian review is excellent and showed Alex Petridis how it should be done.
Never call myself a Nick Cave “fan” but always thought I should be. Some years ago I am having a coffee in a Brighton café when I thinks “That guy over there furiously writing things in his Moleskin, that’s im that is”. I finish my coffee and as I pass him I clear my throat ready to say something meaningful yet non-intrusive. Nick looks up then points downwards with his pencil at his notebook. Suitably chastened I nod and walk off into the late morning drizzle. I have waited in vain for the track entitled “Dickhead what interrupted”
I quite like it, but Skeleton Tree lite is a good description. I thought Skeleton Tree was his best album yet.
The only Cave album I really like is Push The Sky Away. I was interested to see that the Guardian review says “Ghosteen completes a trilogy of records connected by their sound: Push the Sky Away, Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen.” I would say the PTSA is very different. To my ears it has a much warmer and less melodramatic sound than the other two.
Yes, you’re right, but to be fair to Cave, the other two were recorded after the death of his son, so that certainly seeps into the mood on Skeleton Tree. Must have been a really difficult album to make, under the circumstances.
I get a completely different feel, Paul. To me it’s Skeleton Tree ‘heavy’, but I agree that PTSA doesn’t fit with the trilogy idea, certainly not in feel. Maybe I need to listen to PTSA again…
Skeleton Tree was essentially created by Warren Ellis from half-completed work that they couldn’t complete satisfactorily in Paris. The doco released around then attests to that.
Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen may as well be credited to Warren Cave or Nick Ellis, take your pick.
Warren Ellis can either be seen as renewing and reinventing the Bad Seeds sound or as having completely hijacked the band and its sound.
Wow. Just got through the first two tracks. I THINK I’m going to like it a lot but it’s not really something to make tea to.
Will report back.
On my fourth listen. It’s rich it washes over you. I thought of Enya with a deeper voice and heavier lyrics.
This is a good review.
https://www.bernardzuel.net/single-post/2019/10/09/NICK-CAVE-THE-BAD-SEEDS-%E2%80%93-GHOSTEEN-REVIEW
That is good.
I was also keen to hear what Bigmouth would make if it on this weeks podcast. Very interesting conclusions from all four (2 presenters & 2 guests) and some unexpected views.
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/bigmouth/id1107676632?i=1000453196511
Nipping into HMV Vault in Brum last week, just for a browse, and they were playing it. I had already made the decision I wouldn’t like it, based on above, but the enormous swell of melancholy it evoked in me had me buying it immediately. All tone and textures, mood music of such dark depth I was welling up on first full play in the car. I agree tunes are few, but that has never stopped me preferring Gorecki over Holst. I agree with the comment above about it being Skeleton Tree heavy and definitely not lite. If Rings of Saturn is your fave track fro that, like me, you’ll love it. Hard not to see it as my pick of the year.