Last Thursday, just a few hours before the release of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ new album Skeleton Tree, a sold-out crowd shuffled into Manhattan’s Metrograph cinema to experience it for the first time—as a film. It was just one of many screenings taking place that night in cities around the world. Fans had bought tickets weeks in advance to see One More Time With Feeling, which was announced in tandem with Skeleton Treeand billed as a special opportunity to hear the album before its release. But at Metrograph, at least, the atmosphere was more somber than you’d expect for a gathering of fans awaiting new music from a rock icon.
The film, by Cave’s longtime friend and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford director Andrew Dominik,is an emotional, philosophical, and visually striking documentary chronicling the making of Skeleton Tree—a period darkened by the accidental death of Cave’s 15-year-old son Arthur last year. Cave paid for the film and released it in advance of Skeleton Tree’s debut as a sort of offering to fans and press, in lieu of interviews. He didn’t want to endure journalists’ questions about Arthur. But the film also came out of his desire to speak directly to his audience. “Nick told me that he had some things he needed to say, but he didn’t know who to say them to,” Dominik says in his director’s statement. “The idea of a traditional interview, he said, was simply unfeasible but that he felt a need to let the people who cared about his music understand the basic state of things.” After living through not only his teenage son’s death, but also the cruel and sensationalistic media speculation that followed it, you can see why Cave might’ve been wary about letting the press frame his album.
Though One More Time isn’t exactly a visual album like Beyoncé’s Lemonade and Frank Ocean’s Endless, Skeleton Tree is the third major release in the past five months that many listeners first encountered as an audiovisual work. And it doesn’t seem accidental that what Cave shares with those two artists is a desire to communicate directly with his audience, without relying on the media to deliver his message.
In Cave’s case, it’s a new impulse, shaped by circumstances. But Beyoncé has spoken to the press so rarely since 2013 that when she does, it’s an event. Last year, she appeared on the cover of Vogue without even sitting for a profile. Ocean, who has yet to give any interviews about the two albums he dropped in 48 hours last month, prefers to print his own zines and issue statements to fans via Tumblr. By dictating that we experience their new albums first in a visual medium, all three are replacing cover stories with texts of their own. They’re also safeguarding unusually personal works of art—and, to varying extents, their private lives—against misunderstanding.
Like Prince and Madonna, Beyoncé is a pop star who tightly controls her own public image, so it makes sense that she’s at the vanguard of the visual album revolution. While her 2013 self-titled record is a collection of individual videos tied to songs, Lemonade is a complete film that premiered before it was even clear a new album was on the way. The tracklists for the visual album and the audio-only version are identical, but Beyoncé, who co-directed Lemonade, doesn’t just pair images with music. She interrupts songs with sound, silence, poetry from Warsan Shire, and snippets of speeches. There’s a narrative to both versions of Lemonade: a woman discovers she’s been cheated on, then pushes through her anger to find redemption in reconciliation. The film sharpens this story, but foregrounds images of black women standing together—celebrities like Serena Williams and Zendaya are part of the same group portrait as the mothers of Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown and Eric Garner. As Morgan Jerkins wrote, “Lemonade is more than a showcase of just one black woman's humanity. It is a narrative of how black women's healing is a communal art, not an individualistic act.”
These themes are certainly present in the lyrics of the album. But it’s the film, in its images and the additional audio Beyoncé incorporates, that gives them enough potency to overpower the infidelity narrative. And because the film debuted before any audio track on Lemonade besides “Formation” (whose video previewed Lemonade’s aesthetic), it shaped our permanent associations with those songs. The visual album is an accomplished work of cinema in its own right, but it’s also a work of criticism—an instructional manual for reading the music.
Frank Ocean’s Endless is also criticism, though it seems less concerned with drawing out the meaning of any individual song than with rendering visible the Sisyphean work that goes into making music. In the 45-minute visual album—which Ocean directed and released solely in video form, eschewing track divisions and sales—he’s in a warehouse, slowly assembling a staircase to the ceiling, which he climbs… only to end up back in the warehouse, building again.
It’s fitting imagery to accompany what Pitchfork’s Ryan Dombal called“music that plays like a mixtape”—an artform that’s also about showing work. By making the songs inseparable from those minimalist shots, images that don’t compare to Ocean’s lyrics when it comes to vividness, he’s forcing us to associate every track with the stark white room of his metaphorical workshop.
Endless even partially dictates the meaning of Blonde. That album’s songs are too powerful on their own to tether to a video, but when we heard them for the first time, it was with a picture of Frank Ocean working to create them fresh in our minds. After keeping impatient fans waiting four years for a follow-up to channel ORANGE, he seemed to be reminding us that music is made through effort, not magic.
One More Time With Feeling isn’t as high-concept as Lemonade or Endless. It’s certainly not a project that unites music and images in a single multimedia artist’s cohesive statement. Cave didn’t direct it himself. (He had final cut, and wasn’t entirely pleased with his own interviews, but apparently trusted his devoted bandmate Warren Ellis’ positive assessment of the version Dominik delivered.) Aside from the iPhones that are everywhere in the film, the only choice that ties it to the 21st century is Dominik’s use of 3D—which he incorporated to make the black-and-white footage feel like 1950s stereopticon images. Sometimes Cave’s familiar but newly exhausted face comes so clearly into focus, he seems more real than the person sitting next to you in the theater. Other times, the camera moves so perilously over a flight of stairs, you feel like you’re falling down it. Both sensations are disorienting.
The film also feels like a sequel to 20,000 Days on Earth, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s 2014 docudrama about Cave; both are animated by the musician’s bleak thoughts on art, aging, and meaning-making. He and his collaborators sit for interviews, as does his wife, Susie. He talks, first abstractly and then more explicitly, about the way Arthur’s death damaged his writing process and his ability to make sense of life. He’s unsettled by people’s pity. He worries that speaking publicly is in some way appropriating a tragedy that ultimately belongs to his son.
Though it’s not Cave’s own creation, One More Time is its own sort of guide to understanding Skeleton Tree, which diverges subtly enough from the musician’s typically morbid aesthetic to benefit from some additional context. Though he speaks directly to the camera, his message is necessarily murkier than Ocean’s or Beyoncé’s, because tragedy has (further) eroded his belief that anything in life has enduring meaning. He doesn’t really explain individual songs, but Cave’s interviews situate each track on the album within a harrowing chapter of his life (though he talks about the impossibility of viewing his experience as coherent narrative, too).
Like Endless and Lemonade, the film is an artist’s way of solidifying the story behind his album before anyone else gets a chance to impose their own assumptions on it. Without it, listeners might not understand, for example, that Skeleton Tree sounds rawer than the average latter-day Nick Cave record because the band’s mood made perfectionism impossible.
A documentary like this may not seem like such a new thing; even visual albums come out of a synergistic connection between music and cinema that dates back to the latter art form’s birth. Musicians have been performing on film since Al Jolson starred in the very first “talkie,” 1927’s The Jazz Singer. Elvis became a movie star the same year he emerged as the prototypical rock star (1956), and the soundtracks to his big-screen musicals dominated the pop charts just as much as his studio albums. In the ’60s, the Beatles introduced auteurism to the rock film in A Hard Day’s Night, Help!,Magical Mystery Tour, and Yellow Submarine—all features tied to albums of the same name.
Then, of course, there were music videos, whose single-track format freed them from the need to incorporate even the small amount of narrative that tied together the songs in Beatles and Elvis films. The art form took off in the ’70s, laying the groundwork for MTV to dominate the next decade. Pop’s most influential voice of that era, Michael Jackson, eventually stretched his horror and gangster movie-inspired videos nearly to feature length. Fans got used to hearing some songs for the first time in the context of a music video rather than on the radio.
But none of this is exactly the same as premiering a full album in a visual medium. Blondie pioneered that idea in 1979, with Eat to the Beat, though the album’s worth of videos that accompanied promo copies wasn’t available to the public until late the next year. Only in this decade has the release strategy actually become popular. In 2010, Kanye West incorporated most of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’s songs into Runaway, the 35-minute film that debuted a month before the album went on sale. Animal Collective seem to have introduced the phrase “visual album” to the lexicon earlier that year, with ODDSAC—a short, slight, psychedelic feature that premiered at Sundance and was never released as a standalone audio album. Although some critics were already declaring the visual album a new art form by 2012, it wasn’t until Beyoncé appeared the following December that the term gained mainstream cultural traction. (News reports from the ODDSAC era unfailingly put “visual album” in quotes.)
These films attach images and sometimes dialogue to sounds and lyrics in the same way that big-screen adaptations of books attach actors to characters that readers previously had to imagine for themselves. And they’re becoming more successful at it over time—in part because we’re starting to appreciate visual albums as a discrete art form, and in part because they’re just getting better. ODDSAC has already been mostly forgotten; Runaway was ultimately a way of promoting MBDTF, which soon overshadowed it. But Endless and especially Lemonade are going to endure as visual albums because they yolk images to songs in a way that deepens our experience of both. One More Time With Feeling is always going to color our reactions to Skeleton Tree because it’s such an indelible portrait of Cave as he was creating it.
That’s not to say that the rise of the visual album is without inherent dangers. The traditional album is a relatively empowering art form for listeners: absorbing a set of songs for the first time, with headphones on and your eyes closed, you’re free to attach your own imagery to it. By fitting the music into your own frame of reference, you can form a more personal connection to it, even if that means misunderstanding the artist’s intentions a bit.
Adding video or interspersing songs with interviews doesn’t necessarily drag all of an album’s meaning to the surface, but it does leave fewer blanks for the audience to fill in. Nick Cave, Frank Ocean, and Beyoncé all had good reasons to seize some control back from listeners; each had something specific and difficult to say at crucial moments, and they needed to be sure they were communicating clearly. More often, though, music thrives on ambiguity. It would be a shame to see other artists imitate them just because it’s possible.