NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS:

'Skeleton Tree' CD & Vinyl

'Fall if you will, but rise you must'

James Joyce/'Finnegan's Wake'

'I can't go on. I'll go on'

Samuel Beckett/The Unnameable

Nick Cave has always played for high stakes in his songs, his writing, his performances: life and death, love and hate, ecstasy and pain, celebration and desecration, joy and sorrow, sacred and profane. And the list could go on.

Whether he's howling out the surreal post-modern blues of Grinderman or moaning strange updates to the eerie 19^th century song collection put together by Francis James Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, or ringing changes on Orpheus in Hell killing Eurydice with a song (and not so softly), Nick always goes for broke, always risks the whole pot, all in, all or nothing.

'Skeleton Tree' (2016), is more of the same – only, in a terrible and harrowing way, it is much, much more of the same.

A lot has already been made of the sad circumstances surrounding the release of 'Skeleton Tree' – Nick had already started recording the songs when, in July, 2015, Nick's son, 15 year old Arthur, fell from a cliff and died. I can't even begin to imagine what this kind of loss must do to a father, to a mother – here is a hole in the heart that can never be filled, never be healed. It must seem that the world has stopped, right at this moment, and will never, ever go forward again. How can it, how can you deal with something this awful, this final: You can't go on. You go on.

Art, creating with music, with words, with performance, is Nick's work and has been for the entirety of his adult life. That art, obviously, is made out the deep resources of his own life and experience and in that sense, for himself – but it, the art, has also been his work, his job, his meal ticket: what he makes his living by doing and putting out for a public to support.

The songs on 'Skeleton Tree' are not, for the most part, about his son's death; it's not clear how much was already written or even recorded before the loss. Much of the album is, as is often the case with Nick's work, about the trials and tribulations of love, about living with oneself during, for want of a better phrase, those 'dark nights of the soul' that come over the lonely and the lost, the broken, the defiant, the wasted and the wanton: well, about you and me in our worst, and maybe even our best, moments.

That's what art is. That's what work is.

I'm reminded of a passage from the French writer Maurice Blanchot's book, The Writing of the Disaster: 'For work has ceased to be his way of living and has become his way of dying. Work, death: equivalents. And the workplace is everywhere; worktime is all the time.'

And the disaster too is everywhere.

I had written above that this new album is more of the same and yet much much more of the same. What I mean is that the words, the melodies, the structures are very much in the vein of the softer, more introspective musings that we have become familiar with on albums like 'The Boatman's Call' (1997), 'No More Shall We Part' (2001) and 'Push Away The Sky' (2013). What's different here is something intangible: a tenderness in the performance, a vulnerability in the voice, an almost unbearable weight that is somehow miraculously borne up by the very struggle with sorrow and overwhelming loss: 'Fall if you will, but rise you must.'

It's only an opinion of course but I believe this is a work that will raise you up, that will whisper to you of not just loss and fear and sadness but of love, regard, care, tenderness... of going on – of going on when you most think you can't go on.