Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
This is Cave and cohorts' fourth live album, capturing them at an interesting junction in their career: Grinderman has run its course, and Push The Sky Away is the first Bad Seeds album to not include founding member Mick Harvey. Unlike some of its more varied predecessors Push The Sky Away is for the most part considered and restrained in its delivery. Live From KCRW continues that mood, even when it includes seminal Bad Seeds tracks like Mercy Seat, here stripped of its bombast and imbued with creeping dread. Remarkably the intensity remains gripping, with added ache courtesy primarily of Warren Ellis' violin.
All four of the Push The Sky Away songs are the real highlights of the set. Higgs Boson Blues sets the scene with nine minutes of funereal, pulsing gothic blues, laced with line after line of Cave's finest lyrics. Wide Lovely Eyes sticks closely to the album version with its gospel feel and rhythmic industrial chug while Mermaids is a warmer and improved rendition with the addition of a distortion-drenched guitar solo rumbling and groaning through the latter sections.
Not everything works as well; And No More Shall We Part sounds forced and not quite in the band's grasp. The session winds up with a comical introduction to Jack The Ripper, the band hamming it up teaching pianist Cave the chords before he commands Jim Sclavunos to “hammer it, Jim” and the sonic bar brawl of a song kicks into life.
As live albums go this sounds fantastic.
