The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Nick Cave, with Warren Ellis · produced by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis · Goliath · about 40 minutes
Mode
Art rock in the late manner of loop, pad and choir, turned back toward the song with rhythm, menace and abrupt change
Mythos
A passage through catastrophe to a morning: a divine hand reaching down, a fall through threat and loss, a man alive on a balcony in the sun; a figure of grievance made monstrous
Phase
Eight tracks; the agitated, loop-driven songs gather in the first half and the slow, choral and keyboard-led songs in the second; two songs turn into other songs partway through
Presentation
Album; eight tracks, about forty minutes, released digitally by the pair’s own label in February 2021, with vinyl and CD later the same year
Register
Piano, synthesiser pads, loops and processed violin, programmed rhythm and a backing choir; one voice running from spoken menace to croon to near-falsetto
Scale
One voice inside a communal catastrophe that is never named: a couple kept apart, a statue and a protest, a morning
Governing Proposition
Two men who had led a rock band’s sound into loops, pads and choirs turn that language back toward rhythm and violence, and build eight songs on one finding: that inside a communal catastrophe the tenderness that survives does not cancel the violence and is not cancelled by it. Songs break into other songs without warning, a threat opens into a hymn, and a record that begins with a divine hand reaching down ends on a balcony in the morning sun.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record begins as a slow song at the piano, and before it has settled it is broken into. A driving loop surges under it, the voice climbs over the loop, and the song that started has become another song. Nothing announces the change. It is the record’s method stated in its first track: the turn from one state into its opposite happens inside the hearing, without warning, as a catastrophe does, and the listener is given no bridge across it.
Goliath Records, the pair’s own label, released the album digitally on 25 February 2021, and vinyl and CD followed later that year with the same eight tracks. It is credited to Nick Cave and Warren Ellis and not to the Bad Seeds, the band in which both had played. The two produced it. The words are Cave’s, and the music is credited to both. The palette is piano, synthesiser pads, Ellis’s loops and processed violin, programmed rhythm and a backing choir, with Cave’s voice running from speech to croon to near-falsetto across about forty minutes.
The order is Hand of God, Old Time, Carnage, White Elephant, Albuquerque, Lavender Fields, Shattered Ground and Balcony Man, and it carries an argument. The agitated, loop-driven songs, the first, the second and the fourth, all fall in the first half; the slow songs, choral or led by keyboards, hold the rest. The record moves from the event into its aftermath. Its opening track reaches down from above, in its title and its first image, and its last track stands on a balcony in the sun, so that the eight songs make one passage, from a divine hand to a morning.
Movement II
The fourth song is the hinge. A white man speaks threats over a battering pulse, a figure of grievance made monstrous, and the threat goes on for minutes. Then the song opens. A gospel chorus enters, “A time is coming”, and the song lifts clear of everything before it. The choir does not answer the threat or argue with it. Grace arrives without argument, and outlasts what it does not refute. It is the record’s highest point and the plainest statement of what it knows.
What it knows is that inside a communal catastrophe the tenderness that survives does not cancel the violence, and is not cancelled by it; the two are heard in the same breath. The making serves that knowledge. The choir is arranged as a body and held back, so that its late entry changes the song’s nature rather than decorating it. The song also carries the record’s most topical surface. Its threat belongs to the summer of 2020, to toppled statues and to protests, and part of the record is fixed to that season by it.
Old Time, the second track, shows the method at its weakest. It is a churning loop, murky in sound, and its dread restates the opening at a lower definition; it has force without height, and it keeps the record’s law by mood only. Elsewhere in the first half Ellis’s textures keep a dense sound legible, loops, violin and pads laid so that each can be followed, and the piano of the first track is set against the loop so that the break lands as a blow. Several rhythm patterns are plain programmed figures, and some vocals ride the arrangement rather than shape it.
Movement III
The fifth song turns the record inward. Albuquerque tells a life by the places it will not reach: the speaker and his love will not travel there, or anywhere, and the song is a lament for an arrested time. It is a song of lockdown, though the record never names the pandemic. The communal catastrophe is the ground of the whole album, and it is felt here most plainly, not as event but as the cancelled journey, the life held in place.
The title song, third on the record, had already set the couple at the centre of the private world: love said under rain, a voice close to the ear over slow keyboards, a quiet height. Between them the two songs hold what the record holds of love, a couple kept apart and speaking across the separation. They are tender rather than raised, and they would mean much the same heard alone, which is the cost of the record’s second half: its songs are containers for the aftermath more than instruments of it.
The sound they share was the pair’s own inheritance. Push the Sky Away (2013), Skeleton Tree (2016) and Ghosteen (2019) had led Cave from the Bad Seeds’ rock to Ellis’s loops, pads and choirs, and the two had scored films together since The Proposition (2005). This record takes that language back toward the song with rhythm and violence: harder pulses, abrupt changes inside a track, spoken menace beside hymn. It was made without the band. The path, though, was one the two had proved themselves, and the turn from Ghosteen’s suspended drift is a turn within a manner.
Movement IV
Lavender Fields is a hymn, choral and suspended, and its fields are a road taken alone. Here the scriptural language Cave inherited is at its fullest: the hand of God, a kingdom above, a time that is coming, a field to be crossed. Most of it is atmosphere. It colours the songs without bearing their weight, and the figures it summons stay figures. What is built is the passage itself, the fall through threat and loss toward a morning, and it is built by the order of the songs more than by any person in them.
Shattered Ground follows and drifts in the mode Lavender Fields has already set. It is the second soft track of the eight, and in it the record’s palette shows its narrowness: the pads repeat across the second half, choir over pad, and several of the record’s heights are of one kind. The two halves are laid side by side more than fused. The second can be heard as another record in the same sound, and what joins it to the first is the sound more than any argument.
Still one law holds across both. Carnage and tenderness share one space, and neither is allowed to cancel the other, from the threat of the fourth song to the hymn of the sixth. The places the record names, a statue, a city in New Mexico, a balcony, are touched rather than built into its structure, and the particular stays light. The record’s myth is evoked in its language and built in one passage, and it does not ask more of its scripture than the colour of a world in which grace is still possible.
Movement V
The last song is a morning. A man stands on a balcony in the sun, alive and amazed to be, and says so: “this morning is amazing”. It is comic and tender at once, a portrait of one man at his mildest, and it answers the first song directly. A record that began with a hand reaching down into catastrophe ends with a man standing up in the light after it. The choir that answered the threat in the fourth song hums under the morning, and the lightness is earned by everything it follows.
What the record holds is several orders and not all. The mind is held, as dread, desire and amazement; the couple, in the title song and Albuquerque; the state and history, in one song, a grievance, a protest, a statue; the sacred, evoked throughout; and the natural order as rain, fields and morning sun. Labour is absent, and so is the family beyond the couple. One voice joins what is present, and the first half’s public world meets the second half’s private one mainly in the sound.
The record is five and a half years old. It survives as released, with no rival edition. It was widely praised, and Andrew Dominik’s film This Much I Know to Be True (2022) set its songs beside those of Ghosteen, so that it has already been heard again in a second frame; and it made the partnership of the two a front line of Cave’s work rather than a sideline of film scores. No redirection of other musicians’ practice can yet be traced to it. Its rhythms and pads are timbres of their decade, and its tenderness is not.
Act III · The Twelve
Eight tracks in about forty minutes, and the subtractive test mostly fails to find slack. Hand of God must open: a slow piano song broken into by a driving loop, it states the record’s whole method in one track. White Elephant is the hinge, menace and grace in one song, and Balcony Man the required close, a morning after the catastrophe. The title song and Albuquerque each carry what no other song carries: love said under rain, and a life arrested in place. The test bites twice. Old Time is a churning loop whose dread restates the opening at a lower definition, and Shattered Ground drifts in the mode Lavender Fields has already set. Two soft tracks in eight hold it from the top.
Score: 7.8 / 10
What the record uncovers can be stated: inside a communal catastrophe, the tenderness that survives does not cancel the violence and is not cancelled by it, and the two are heard in the same breath. White Elephant gives the sharpest form. A white man speaks threats over a battering pulse; then the song opens into a gospel chorus, “A time is coming”, which does not answer the threat but outlasts it. Albuquerque discloses the arrest of lockdown, a life told by the places it will not reach, so the catastrophe is shown at two scales, public and private. Sound discloses as fully as words: the loops press and the choir releases. Held back because much of the yield is mood, dread and solace, and the stated condition rests on one song.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Elevation comes often and in both temperatures. The break in Hand of God, where the piano gives way to the surging loop and the voice climbs over it, is transport. White Elephant’s gospel turn is the summit: after minutes of threat the choir enters and the song lifts clear of everything before it, grace arriving without argument. The title song holds a quiet height, a voice close to the ear over slow keyboards; Lavender Fields is a hymn, choral and suspended; Balcony Man ends on a lightness it has earned. Old Time has force without height, and Albuquerque and Shattered Ground stay level. Five of eight tracks rise. The highest is very high but not the highest the medium reaches, and choir over pad makes several of the heights one kind.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Myth is evoked throughout and built in one passage. The language is Cave’s scriptural inheritance: the hand of God, a kingdom above, fields of lavender as a road taken alone, a time that is coming. The built pattern is a passage through catastrophe to a morning. The record opens on a divine hand reaching down, falls through threat and loss, and ends on a balcony in the sun, a man alive and amazed to be (“this morning is amazing”). The morning answers the hand that reached down, and the sequence builds the passage. The white elephant is a figure of grievance made monstrous, half a type. Held back because the frame is carried by the order of the songs more than by any figure, the scripture is mostly atmosphere, and the particulars, a statue, a city in New Mexico, a balcony, are touched rather than built into structure.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The inheritance is the pair’s own. Push the Sky Away (2013), Skeleton Tree (2016) and Ghosteen (2019) had already led Cave from the Bad Seeds’ rock to Ellis’s loops, pads and choirs, and the two had scored films together since The Proposition (2005). This record turns that language back toward the song with rhythm and violence: harder pulses, abrupt changes inside a track, spoken menace beside hymn. The turn from Ghosteen’s suspended drift is real, and the credit to the two of them marks a stake, a record made without the band. But the path was proven by the pair themselves, the audience was secure, and the departure is within a manner rather than from one: a turn of degree, made safely.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Change the form and the record loses part of what it knows. Its knowledge is the coexistence of violence and grace, and the form that carries it is the song that breaks into another song: Hand of God from ballad to pulse, White Elephant from threat to hymn. Played as songs of one mood each, the record would be a set of dark songs and a set of tender ones; built this way, the turn happens inside the hearing, without warning, as catastrophe does. The sequence is counted here, once: the agitated tracks gather in the first half and the slow ones in the second, so the record moves from the event into its aftermath, and Balcony Man answers Hand of God. Held back because the second half’s songs are containers more than instruments.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Five and a half years supply little evidence, and the axis is forecast more than shown. Some return is demonstrated: Andrew Dominik’s film This Much I Know to Be True (2022) set these songs beside Ghosteen’s, so the record has been heard again in a second frame. On return the loops separate into layers and the choir into parts, and White Elephant’s turn keeps its shock. The words give less: some lines are plain statement, some scriptural phrases that yield their sense at once. Part of what listeners bring is the singer’s life, the loss behind the two records before, which is projection onto this one and is not credited. A forecast yield, formal more than semantic, with its first return already shown.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The field is the singer-songwriter and art-rock album of the early 2020s. The intrinsic force is modest: the record shows the late Cave manner, loop, pad and choir, able to carry rhythm, menace and topical speech as well as elegy, which enlarges a manner without reorganising a field. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within five years the record was widely praised, was set into film, and made the partnership of the two a front line of Cave’s work rather than a sideline of film scores. No redirection of other musicians’ practice is traced to it, and the reach the late manner has belongs first to Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen. Delayed reach cannot yet be credited, which holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, with one other.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Survival is weighed over five and a half years, which is all the record can show. The form is whole: the record as released is the record sold, with no rival edition. Presence is continuous for its age, in streaming and in film, wide among Cave’s large public and narrower beyond it; popularity is credited as presence, not proof. The fabric is charged twice. White Elephant fixes part of the surface to the summer of 2020, its toppled statues and its protests, and the programmed rhythms and synthesiser pads are timbres of their decade. The charge is lightened because the record never names the pandemic and its tenderness is not topical. A young record’s survival, in the lower middle of what its age allows.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. Ellis’s textures are the making: loops, processed violin and pads layered so that the dense first half stays legible and the second half breathes. The choir is arranged as a body and held back, entering late in White Elephant to change the song’s nature; the piano of Hand of God is placed against the loop so that the break lands as a blow. Cave’s voice runs from spoken menace to croon to near-falsetto and holds each. The faults are more than one: several rhythm patterns are plain programmed figures, Old Time’s loop is murky, the pads repeat a narrow palette across the second half, and some vocals ride the arrangement rather than shape it. Load-bearing on most tracks, faulted on a share.
Score: 8.2 / 10
One law governs the record: carnage and tenderness held in one space, neither allowed to cancel the other. The two most distant elements obey it. White Elephant’s spoken threat over a battering pulse and Balcony Man’s comic, tender morning are one man’s world seen at its worst and its mildest, and the choir that answers the threat is the choir that hums under the morning. The range is real: threat, hymn, love song, lockdown lament and comic portrait, from programmed pulse to sustained choral drone. The law strains at Old Time, which obeys by mood only, and the two halves are laid side by side more than fused, so that the second can be heard as another record in the same sound. One strain, no break.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as dread, desire and amazement. The couple is held in the title song and Albuquerque, love said across separation. The state and history enter in White Elephant, racial grievance, a protest, a statue, with force but in one song. The communal catastrophe is the ground of the whole, felt in the arrested travel of Albuquerque and never named. The sacred is evoked constantly; the natural order is rain, fields and morning sun. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, with one other, is what is missing and how the rest is joined: labour and the family beyond the couple are absent, and the first half’s public world meets the second half’s private one mainly in the sound.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime and The Made at 8.2, then The Inner Law at 8.1. Elevation on five of eight tracks, highest where the choir enters White Elephant after minutes of threat; a making in which loops, violin and pads keep a dense first half legible and the choir is held back to change a song’s nature; and one law, carnage and tenderness in one space, obeyed from the spoken threat to the comic morning.
Limiting Dimension
Pressure on Tradition and The Encompassed at 7.2: a late manner enlarged to carry rhythm, menace and topical speech, with no redirection of other musicians traced to it; and several orders held, the state and history in one song, labour and the family beyond the couple absent. Next above them, The Swerve at 7.3: a turn of degree from the pair’s own proven path, made safely.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.8, The Made at 8.2, The Inner Law at 8.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Unconcealment at 8.0, The Archetypal Deep at 8.0, The Imperishable at 7.5, The Swerve at 7.3 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.2 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Swerve, 7.3, and Pressure on Tradition, 7.2, both below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.2. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.8, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · the album as released digitally by Goliath Records, the pair’s own label, on 25 February 2021: eight tracks in their order, about forty minutes, produced by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, the words Cave’s and the music credited to both. The vinyl and CD issued later in 2021 carry the same eight tracks and are the same work. Judged from knowledge of the recording and its reception; no recording or lyric sheet was in hand. Songs are cited by title; words are quoted only where certain and never beyond four words, and the rest are paraphrased. Push the Sky Away, Skeleton Tree, Ghosteen and the pair’s film scores are named as inheritance, and Andrew Dominik’s This Much I Know to Be True (2022) as evidence of return, not as the object. The loss behind the two records before is not credited to this one. Facts that could not be verified, among them the date of the physical release, the track timings, the studio, the recording dates and the circumstances of the recording, the names of the backing singers, one image in White Elephant and the record’s stage history, are not given.