Ghosteen by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
Ghosteen is the seventeenth studio album by the Australian rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. It was released on 4 October 2019 on Ghosteen Ltd and is due to be released physically on 8 November 2019 on Bad Seed Ltd. Ghosteen is a double album—the band's first since Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus (2004)—and the final part of a trilogy of albums that includes Push the Sky Away (2013) and Skeleton Tree (2016). Recording Ghosteen was recorded in various locations in the United States, England and Germany between 2018 and early 2019. Sessions were recorded at Woodshed Recording Studios in Malibu and NightBird Recording Studios in West Hollywood, California in the US; Retreat Studios in Brighton, England; and Candy Bomber Studio in Berlin, Germany. By January 2019, Nick Cave said he and the Bad Seeds had "nearly finished a new record". Ghosteen was subsequently mixed by Cave, Warren Ellis, Lance Powell and Andrew Dominik at Conway Recording Studios in Los Angeles, California. Composition Ghosteen is a double album containing 11 tracks, one of which is a spoken-word piece. The first part of the album features eight songs, which Nick Cave describes as "the children"; the second part of the album contains two longer songs and a spoken-word track, which he describes as "their parents". In summarising Ghosteen, Cave referred to the album both as "a migrating spirit" and the final part of a trilogy of albums he and the Bad Seeds began with Push the Sky Away (2013). Ghosteen has been described as an ambient album and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' "most minimalist … work to date", with the album's instrumentation featuring "little more than synths and piano" alongside Cave's vocals. Cave began writing lyrics for the songs on Ghosteen in February 2017. Cave, who had "very deliberately" not written lyrics since the end of 2015, attributed a "new sort of lyrical confidence" to a process of "enforced shutdown", where he would "confine self to barracks for a while". The lyrics were written at Cave's home in Brighton, a change from his usual "disciplined" routine of writing lyrics in a private office. The album's lyrics have been described as "fantasy stories" that contain themes of "love, loss and letting go". Release Ghosteen was released on 4 October 2019 on streaming services and as a digital download on Ghosteen Ltd. Double CD and LP editions are due to be released a month later on 8 November on Bad Seed Ltd, the band's own imprint. Several album-listening events were held in 33 cities in Australia, Europe and the US on 3 October, alongside a worldwide YouTube stream featuring an animated lyric film directed by Tom Hingston. The album was announced by Nick Cave in response to a fan question on his blog, The Red Hand Files, on 23 September. The title, track listing and brief descriptions of the album's songs were revealed; a second follow-up post the same day included the album's cover art. The lyrics to "Fireflies", Ghosteen's penultimate track, had previously been published in the first-ever issue of The Red Hand Files a year prior. Writing for The Guardian, Alexis Petridis summarised that Ghosteen featured "the most beautiful songs has ever recorded" and awarded it a full five-out-of-five-star rating. Petridis considered the album to be "an infinitely warmer, sweeter sibling" to Skeleton Tree, noting that "it continues and extends the weightless, drifting style of its two predecessors." In another five-star review for NME, Elizabeth Aubrey said "if Skeleton Tree gave a glimpse into grief in its immediate aftermath, Ghosteen is a grief considered", drawing comparisons between Cave's lyrics and CS Lewis' A Grief Observed (1960), in that the album "feels like the trying-to-make-sense stage of grief, even when there's often no sense to be found." Aubrey praised Ghosteen as "a work of extraordinary, unsettling scope", calling it the Bad Seeds' most beautiful album "and also one of the most singularly devastating." The Independent reviewer Helen Brown called Ghosteen "astonishing" in a five-out-of-five-star review, praising in particular Cave's vocals and lyrics and Warren Ellis' use of analogue synthesisers, which she described as "a warm cloud of ambient solace".
The cover art for Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ 17th album couldn’t feel more removed from the man once known as a snarling, terrifying prince of poetic darkness. This heavenly forest with its vibrant flowers, rays of sun and woodland creatures feels comically opposed to anything Cave has ever represented—but perhaps that’s the point. This pastel fairy tale sets the scene for <i>Ghosteen</i>, his most minimalist, supernatural work to date, in which he slips between realms of fantasy and reality as a means to accept life and death, his past and future.<br /> In his very first post on The Red Hand Files—the website Cave uses to receive and respond to fan letters—he spoke of rebuilding his relationship with songwriting, which had been damaged while enduring the grief that followed his son Arthur’s death in 2015. He wrote, “I found with some practise the imagination could propel itself beyond the personal into a state of wonder. In doing so the colour came back to things with a renewed intensity and the world seemed clear and bright and new.” It is within that state of wonder that <i>Ghosteen</i> exists.<br /> “The songs on the first album are the children. The songs on the second album are their parents,” Cave has explained. Those eight “children” are misty, ambient stories of flaming mares, enchanted forests, flying ships and the eponymous, beloved Ghosteen, described as a “migrating spirit”. The second album features two longer pieces, connected by the spoken-word “Fireflies”. He tells fantasy stories that allude to love and loss and letting go, and occasionally brings us back to reality with detailed memories of car rides to the beach and hotel rooms on rainy days.<br /> These themes aren’t especially new, but the feeling of this album is. There are no wild murder ballads or raucous, bluesy love songs. Though often melancholy, it doesn’t possess the absolute devastation and loneliness of 2016’s <i>Skeleton Tree</i>. Rather, these vignettes and symbolic myths are tranquil and gentle, much like the instrumentation behind them. With little more than synths and piano behind Cave’s vocals, <i>Ghosteen</i> might feel uneventful at times, but the calmness seems to help his imagination run free. On “Bright Horses”, he sings of “Horses broken free from the fields/They are horses of love, their manes full of fire.” But then he pulls back the curtain and admits, “We’re all so sick and tired of seeing things as they are/Horses are just horses and their manes aren’t full of fire/The fields are just fields, and there ain’t no lord… This world is plain to see, it don’t mean we can’t believe in something.”<br /> Through these dreamlike, surreal stories, Cave is finding his path to peace. And he’s learned that he isn’t alone on his journey. On “Galleon Ship”, he begins, “If I could sail a galleon ship, a long, lonely ride across the sky,” before realising: “We are not alone, it seems, so many riders in the sky/The winds of longing in their sails, searching for the other side.”
