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

If you read the lyric sheets from Push The Sky Away in tracklisted order, there's a narrative thread that artfully informs the next song. This makes for an immersive listen, there's no need to multitask or check Facey while the band's 15th studio album caresses your receptors. Nick Cave's delivery is flawless as usual, his poetic turn of phrase often utilising repetition to set a vivid scene. He'll never tire of lewd lyrical content (“I was the match that would fire up her snatch”) and we'll always expect mythological imagery to hover around unexpected references that make us smirk: Wikipedia and Miley Cyrus, which is typed incorrectly in the Deluxe Edition's hardback, linen-bound book as “Mylie” (reminiscent of Kylie). This edition also contains a bonus DVD featuring two startling spoken-word tracks – Needle Boy and Lightning Bolts – that deserve to be heard.

Jubilee Street – with its accompanying John Hillcoat-directed video clip – is a cinematic streetscape (“I got a foetus on a leash”) and the scope of this arrangement sweeps the listener up musty staircases, forcing repressed memories awake. Finishing Jubilee Street arrives three songs later with motifs from its companion piece. Sweetly sung backing vocals courtesy of The Children Of École Saint Martin act as hypnotic lure: “See that girl/Comin' on down/Comin' on down/Comin' on down.” The sprawling, seven-plus minute opus Higgs Boson Blues comes across as dreamscape until the album's title track throbs through your headphones before gradually fading out to close.    

The feverish hysteria of previous full-length Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! is put to rest as Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds Push The Sky Away, meditating/levitating above a bed Warren Ellis has made by interweaving mysterious loops, quivering flute and spectral violin .