Of all the malevolent characters in Cave’s vast catalogue, the entity lurking on the edge of town “past the square, past the bridge, past the mills, past the stacks” and manipulating the wills of men so that they’re “one microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan”, is his most terrifying and enduring creation.
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‘Red Right Hand’, certainly the most widely recognised Bad Seeds song because of its use in the Scream movies and the BBC series ‘Peaky Blinders’, is the thematic crux of the record. On Let Love In, Cave’s fire-and-brimstone storytelling is scaled back in favour of portraits of the human condition, scene-setting, and character studies as he meditates on love and hate, good and evil, while The Bad Seeds do some of their most ornate, intricate work ever. Retaining the same line-up from Henry’s Dream, there was no better example in my mind of the intuition that The Bad Seeds had developed with each other and their leader by the ‘90s. When I first started thinking about this list, Let Love In was my initial pick for top spot. A striking and deeply poignant experience, Skeleton Tree was a masterclass in repose, humanity and dignity as well as instantly being regarded among Cave’s finest ever works. The Bad Seeds provided the most nebulous and unintrusive of accompaniments, taking a back seat as Cave’s writing skills were relied upon to do the heavy lifting, which it did with all the grace and strange insight you would expect.
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His vocals are unquestionably human, full of vulnerability yet holding itself together because that is the only way we can collectively get through tragedy. Cave’s personal loss is never front-and-centre – rather, it is a spectral presence that looms over the music and in its background, as wraithlike epics like ‘Jesus Alone’ and ‘Distant Sky’ uncoiled themselves in stately fashion.Īlluded to in fascinating, code-like couplets filled with imagery rather than being addressed head on, which would have been much too ugly an experience to document on something so comparatively throwaway as an album, the listener never feels like they’re intruding uncomfortably on Cave’s torment.
However, the record is not some unimaginable, overbearing monolith, and this is testament to its author’s unique songwriting. The singer had always used tragedy as a creative conceit throughout his 30-year career, but for many it was hard to imagine him countenancing the use of something so personal and airing it on one of his albums.įinishing sessions that had already commenced earlier in 2015 and had largely been completed, and accompanied by a documentary film One More Time With Feeling at the time of its release, Skeleton Tree was the sound of rock’s foremost authority on torment and destruction coming face-to-face with his own unimaginable grief. In July 2015, Cave’s teenage son Arthur fell to his death from a cliff near Brighton, having been found to have been experimenting with LSD with friends at the time. Skeleton Tree, the 16 th Bad Seeds album, came into existence overcast by the context of unthinkable tragedy.
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