Nick Cave has always been a strikingly candid lyricist. He gives you the picture and it’s clear-cut and sometimes it’s dreary, sometimes it’s sad, sometimes it’s violent. But it’s always clear and half-sung, half-spoken with that deep, gravelly voice of his, quivering with passion. Skeleton Tree is no different. Except that halfway through the recording of the record, Cave’s 15-year-old son fell to his death off a cliff in Brighton.
Skeleton Tree is not a happy record. And Cave’s loss is explicitly felt throughout the entirety of the material on the album. If you’re looking for an album that’s diverse, keep looking. Compared to the coldly romanticized violence of Murder Ballads, and the impassioned narratives concerning love and lust on Let Love In, Skeleton Tree hits only one note, and keeps on hitting it, despite the hopefulness of its arc: grief.
Interestingly, much of the production on Skeleton Tree makes use of cold synths and sustained strings, and messily-defined echoes and vocal samples. There’s little to no musical structure or backbone in “Jesus Alone,” for example, other than Cave’s grave, tired voice, which at one point proclaims: “You believe in God, but you get no special dispensation for this belief now. / You’re an old man sitting by the fire, hear the mist rolling off the sea. / You’re a distant memory in the mind of your creator, don’t you see?” And then the simple chorus, “With my voice / I am calling you.”
The rest of the record is just as devastated. Much of the instrumentals on the record are murky, which I believe appropriately reflect on Cave’s state of mind during recording: this man’s grief permeates absolutely every second of Skeleton Tree, and if we’re being honest here, the record gets hard to listen to at some points. It doesn’t get happier as it progresses, all we get is more grief. “I was an electrical storm on the bathroom floor, clutching the bowl / My blood was for the gags and other people’s diseases,” Cave recites on “Magneto,” a track that’s unflinchingly a product of grief.
It’s at this point that it starts dawning on the listener, on me, just how perverted this whole thing is. Here’s a man being torn apart, literally telling me: “Oh, the urge to kill somebody was basically overwhelming. I had such hard blues down there in the supermarket queues.” And here I am, not exactly being “entertained,” although entertainment is what many might say music is for. (It’s not called the entertainment industry for nothing.) There was a moment while listening to this record, on the song “I Need You” where Cave, voice quivering, tries to hit a moderately high note, and absolutely misses it. His voice catches. He’s nowhere near the note he needs to be at. But keeps singing. And as he moans “Nothing really matters, not even today / No matter how hard I try” I realized he was sobbing.
There’s nothing glamorous about it. We’re simply listening to a man drowning in grief, trying to do something and realizing that he can’t do anything. “They told us our dreams would outlive us,” Cave muses on “Distant Sky.” “They told us our gods would outlive us. But they lied.”
The last track on the record, “Skeleton Tree” is the most fleshed out instrumentally. A piano and light drum kit push us along the synth backing. The imagery, however, is just as, if not more disjointed than that of the songs that precede it. But we are presented with a more passive image than before, of a tree “pressed against the sky.”
As the instrumental sort of fades out passively around him, Cave ends the record, this monolith of suffering, by repeating “And it’s alright now” three times.
I’m not sure I believe that.
I’m not sure he believes that.
But I think he’s trying to.
