1. GHOSTEEN - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

This album has had me under a spell for the last month. As promised in the title, it is ethereal and other-worldly, a beautiful study in grief. Written after the death of his son, the two disc album captures Cave’s desperate, haunting mourning, as well as an undeniable sense of his son, Arthur, communicating through the lyrics and soundscape. Initially polarising fans, being such a far throw from his earlier work, Ghosteen has since been hailed by many as Cave’s best work. Conjuring up streams of dreamlike imagery, Cave drifts between the micro and the macro of his crippling experience of loss, the abstract and the very real. Opening song Spinning Song is a reeling portrayal of the shock and numbness of hearing the worst news imaginable - Cave sings ‘And you’re sitting at the kitchen table, listening to the radio’, the image he last remembers of his wife just before they received the news of Arthur’s death. A heartbreakingly simple image that contrasts the fantastical world he paints in other songs; he sings of ‘bright horses of wonder, springing from your burning hand’, ‘a spiral of children climb[ing] up to the sun, waving goodbye to you and goodbye to me’, and ‘the moonlit man, with suitcase in his hand’. The triumph of the album for me is title track Ghosteen, which begins with an almost hymn-like, awestruck ode to ‘ghosteen’. The music swells into a song of praise, the lyrics of ‘a ghosteen dances in my hand, dancing, dancing all around’ rolling over twinkling instrumentation. The pivot that the song makes just after six minutes in feels like a physical stab in the gut. The presence of Arthur suddenly brings the song to a standstill, triggering a lament of grief so raw and honest that it is difficult to listen to. Cave is almost childlike in his words, reduced to simplicity by the scale of his despair; The three bears watch TV, they age a lifetime, oh Lord. Mama bear holds the remote, papa bear he just floats, and baby bear he has gone, to the moon in a boat’.

Lyric after lyric of piercing emotional clarity and vulnerability sit over a sonic landscape that is both light and fragile while tapping into a deep well of emotion in this album; a testament to the power of creativity in accessing, sharing and healing from deep grief. In his book Faith, Hope and Carnage, Cave describes how, after Arthur’s death, ‘the world seemed to vibrate with a peculiar, spiritual energy’. This is the feeling that bursts through the album. It is truly a masterpiece.

Best song: Ghosteen

Best listened to when: This one definitely needs full attention, and is best listened to in one sitting. Anywhere with tissues handy!

You’ll like it if you like: Difficult to compare this album to any others, as it doesn’t conform to any one genre; you will enjoy it if you like ambient music, theatre and film soundtracks, spoken word… the focus is more on the world building than the individual songs.