Ghosteen, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Currently doing one album for each year, 1960-2020. Today: 2019.

Ghosteen, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, 2019, 1:08

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

This is the album born out of Nick Cave's grief at losing his son in a terrible accident.  This is the album in which he is saying that his son is here next to him, not in his heart, but with him.  It's a gorgeous work of art.  It's also terribly abstruse and poetic and personal and ethereal and insular.  It just is, this album; it doesn't ask for your approval or your understanding.  I think that you can no more quantify or criticize this album than you could a dream.  Favorite tracks: "Bright Horses," "Sun Forest."  It's difficult to take them out of context, however.

Nocturama, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Currently doing one album for each year, 1960-2020. Today: 2003. 

Nocturama, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, 2003, :56

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

So this is the "bad" Nick Cave album, the one excoriated as a bomb, with critics carping that Nick Cave is at this point in time a contented middle-aged father of three with nothing to bemoan or be gothic about, and the Bad Seeds sounding more like the Wallflowers than the unpredictable band they are.  Now I went into this album not knowing any of that.  I wasn't prepared for the worst, best, or anything in between.  So to me it sounds like... a Nick Cave album.  It's true that the lyrical content leans a lot more toward the love song than the murder ballad, but so what?  Rather than assuming Cave had lost his "edge," I just assume he's being moved by a new muse.  Griping that Nick Cave isn't being as spooooky as you want is like complaining that bands that get discovered by more than five people are "selling out."  It's just such a childish kneejerk reaction.  Favorite tracks: "Still In Love," "There Is a Town," the fourteen-minute rager "Babe, I'm On Fire."