THIS is Nick Cave's first album since the death of his teenage son and while some reviewers have referenced it, Cave insists these songs were written ahead of the tragedy and unintended messages shouldn't be read into them.

That said, something is very different, here. Although musically and lyrically a bedfellow of Push The Sky Away, rather than more muscular Bad Seeds offerings, Skeleton Tree moulders with new-found desolation. It's Cave's ashen, elegiac performances of his own words, rather than their meaning, that is so powerful. Even more so on the official videos.

He has long been the voice of desperation, vulnerability and morbidity. A hypnotic man whose labyrinthine lyrics inhabit another time and another place. It's just for all the metaphors, on this album he is singing about himself.

Nowhere more so than on I Need You; full of pain, beyond bleak, yet utterly beautiful, and with Warren Ellis's unnerving electronica, tracks such as the astonishing Jesus Alone and Rings of Saturn scare the bejesus out of you, while at the same time offering comfort like some sort of ethereal cotton wool.

Indeed hope always figures somewhere in a Nick Cave album. The only difference now is the darkness from which it springs is real, not of the imagination. On Distant Sky, he sings: "Let us go now, my only companion...watch the sun, watch it rising in your eyes." Perhaps of all the songs on this dark, harrowing, magnificent album, it offers the deepest insight into his current state of mind.

Blackstar aside, nothing this year has come close to Skeleton Tree, maybe not this decade, and five stars is a woefully inadequate rating. That it should have taken such a catastrophe to produce such a masterful performance is the album's real sadness.