At almost 60 years old, Nick Cave, always accompanied by his faithful musicians, the Bad Seeds, is on his 16th album, "The Skeleton Tree". The context? Sad: her 15-year-old son, one of her twins, died when he fell off a cliff in the summer of 2015. For the Australian crooner, half-cursed poet, half adventurer of the great outdoors, a double work is then imposed on him: that of mourning, and that of producing songs.
Flamboyant lyrics, "acoustic ambient
This is how "The Skeleton Tree" is released, also announced by a documentary film directed by Andrew Dominik, whose songs can be thought to have all been rewritten following the tragic accident. It is not, and it is from there that the strength of the album is drawn: Nick Cave, bruised, will simply reinterpret these songs, with his usual verve and black romanticism, dressed this time with a funereal theatricality in the voice. Listening, we are plunged into a beneficial musical slump. The dissonant harmonies with a very organic sound (no digital in this album), and the minimalist rhythm, punctuated by solemn strings, all in an acoustic hubbub, delicate and ambient, gives a strangely attractive feeling.
Beauty against all evils
The beauty when Nick writes "With my voice, I am calling you" can only emerge then, when you want to get out of the nets of this ordeal. Fighting nihilism, a concept that has the double and paradoxical particularity of relativizing the unbearable as much as pushing towards the loss of one's own life impulses: which song can best illustrate this incessant struggle, between acceptance of the drama and revolt against it, than "I Need You". The leitmotif of this song, wounded, arranged with repetitive motifs, which throbbles and rocks, is "Nothing really matters", nothing matters anymore. On the contrary, it is the imperative need to sing that imposes itself, and which reminds forever that the destiny of Nick Cave, to accompany his life and his torments, it is his songs, which will survive the finitude of men, however brutal it may be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAMZYpZi_M4
