Album Review: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Push The Sky Away

Much is already being made about how Push The Sky Away, the 15^th studio album from Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds, is showing his mellower side. Granted, the album lacks the sonic histrionics of 2008's Dig! Lazarus! Dig! or the puerile brutality and visceral annihilation of Grinderman, yet Cave is in fine mettle here, coping with the departure of indelible collaborator Mick Harvey by stripping away the guitars and augmenting the other sizable elements, especially the efforts of Warren Ellis. The result is an understated gem that revels in Cave's dark lyrical frivolity, gutter-courting mirth and instrumental gymnastics, all coalescing into a man's laconic post-script as he looks back on an age of hedonism and banality.

Opening with We No Who U R, which precipitates Cave's fascination with the perverse machinations of the Internet Age, it's an album of peaks and troughs, buoyed by apocryphal half-truths and haunting flourishes. Water's Edge is tense and barely restrained, a Gothic tragedy reminiscent of Where The Wild Roses Grow, yet more readily threatening to burst the banks in a morbid purge, Ellis' violin looping amongst a bass rumble and some lurid lyrics (“their legs wide to the world like bibles open”). Jubilee Street is stunning, a broken ode to a murdered prostitute; the empty threat that is We Real Cool rattles the cages; the kaleidoscopic demi-dirge of Higgs Boson Blues flails maniacally amidst Lucifer and his courtesans, including Robert Johnson and Hannah Montana.

Push The Sky Away is the Bad Seeds at their most unearthly, and Cave at his most obtuse. Together, they create a record that won't go quietly into the night.