Like the specter of death’s door that haunts David Bowie’s Blackstar and the treatise on existence’s end that is Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker, there’s no manner in which to avoid the sudden passing of Nick Cave’s teenage son, Arthur. It’s the sorrowful, purple centerpiece of Skeleton Tree. Mourning marks every element of its portraiture, from the crepuscular sweep of Warren Ellis’ strings and the tremor of Jim Sclavunos’ brushed, jazzy drums to Cave’s own torturously prescient lyrics on “Jesus Alone.” Atop a gentle, trembling piano line, Cave strikes, python-like—quiet but deadly—with, “You fell from the sky and crash landed in a field,” a line that rips you from your listening once you gather how his child passed and how its author wrote it before this album’s sessions. There’s dark-star glitter set against the ruins and remains of the day on the title track (“I used to think that when you died you kind of wandered the world/In a slumber till you crumbled”) and the heartbroken and etherealized “Distant Sky” with its cry of, “They told us our gods would outlive us, but they lied.”
Yet, Skeleton Tree is never merely funereal. It’s too dramatic and documentary-like for that.
Like the searing, silver-and-black cinéma vérité of One More Time With Feeling—the film short Cave and Co. produced for his devoted fan base to avoid repeated discussion—Skeleton Tree hits its ruminative subject spot-on while removing Cave from the personae of the Literate Last Angry Man he often carries between his arms and torso. In its stead, Cave is propelled, lyrically and vocally, into an author ripe with compassion, confession, empathy and earthen remorse. 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.
—A.D. Amorosi
