Ghosteen
I got into Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds originally circa 1999 or 2000. The live album (Live Seeds) was a strong favourite, things like The Mercy Seat and Papa Won’t Leave You Henry were full energy punches to the face, and even the slower stuff like the Ship Song had me breaking out the acoustic guitar. The other big hitters of my early Cave years were Let Love In and Murder Ballads, the latter of which is largely jokey, but still pulls together Shane MacGowan, PJ Harvey, Kylie Minogue, a 14 minute track about a guy massacring an entire bar, and the joy of my teenage years, The Curse of Millhaven. This is even before I came near The Boatman’s Call.
This is all building up to the first Cave album released after I got on board, No More Shall We Part. And I was disappointed. It was quiet, very, very wordy, mostly piano driven, very light on murder. I didn’t quite know what to do with it. But, since I was seventeen, and I had paid cash money for the CD, the only thing to do was to listen to it dozens and dozens of times. And now, I love it like it’s my own child. I remember walking around the car park of Superquinn Sutton collecting trolleys, while subtly having earphones blasting Hallelujah into my brain. Learning to play the very satisfying moment where the title track opens up. Somehow realising I know all the words to the novel that is Darker by the Day. And that’s the point of this music project. To get to that level of intimacy with an album.
So Ghosteen. Nick Cave had two sons, twins, one of whom died a couple of years ago and this album is more or less about that. I gave it a spin or two prior to this project, and after all the glowing reviews, musically at least it seemed to me like just a bunch of swirly bullshit.
So now that I’ve listened to it maybe eleven or twelve times, I’m not quite at the level of No More Shall We Part, but I feel it starting to open up. Certain moments have emerged, and I begin to anticipate them. Listen for The kid drops his bucket and spade/And climbs into the sun before the music drops and leaves your stomach behind. Cave has said that the album is divided into two, conceptually, and I’ve found the second half much stronger, at this point. Even if it’s mainly two tracks of twelve and fourteen minute duration, I can find time for them.