Skeleton Tree is an un-album. It’s a record defined by loss, a chronicle of missing things, and its power derives as much from what it doesn’t contain as from what it does.
Songs break and buckle under the weight of suggestion, and a host of known unknowns press down on the record with all the insistence of a brain tumour against the back of the eye.
The record is dark, of course – ‘Jesus Alone’ scalds, and ‘Anthrocene’ is all barely-repressed horror – but it’s not an all-out exercise in despair, and the piece is full of spit-soaked snatches of beauty. It hurts, but it’s not of hurt and it has no desire to inflict it.
Indeed, at times there are flourishes that could almost be described as kitsch; great swathes of pink painted against the canvas of black, and the female solo on ‘Distant Sky’ has a baroque beauty that transforms the track’s subtle tragedy into something else entirely.
But, ultimately, reviews like this are pointless. They’re just words: sparks off a match compared to a bonfire. Skeleton Tree is one of the greatest artistic achievements of the year, but it’s also much more than that. Not a record but a trembling snatch of life, offered up and ready for you to take.
