Music

Push The Sky Away: A Review

This year marks 30 years of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, as well as the release of their 15th studio album, Push The Sky Away.

Greatly anticipated by fans and critics alike, the record has been a source of both confusion and lauding from audiences. Some have even gone as far as to call it a ‘late-period masterpiece’.

The album opens with the instantly disarming We No Who U R, the Prince-esque title providing a subtle nod to the themes addressed throughout the record. Reportedly, the songs arose from “Googling curiosities [and] being entranced by exotic Wikipedia entries,” with a focus on “how on the internet profoundly significant events, momentary fads and mystically-tinged absurdities sit side-by-side.” With its delicate flute melodies, drum machine rhythms and a slow-burning, vulnerable vocal from Cave, the song sets the tone for an album full of surprises.

A far cry from the priapic garage-rock of 2008’s Dig, Lazarus, Dig!! and Cave’s bastard child ‘other band’, Grinderman, Push The Sky Away is like waking up from a particularly intense dream and experiencing a moment of clarity. The songs have a space and an atmosphere like no other album in Cave’s canon.

‘Tiny little sounds’, as Cave calls them, fill the gaps where former Bad Seed Mick Harvey’s hellacious guitar would once have been. Harvey left the group in 2009, after 30 years of service, and Warren Ellis’s violins, loop-pedals and flutes now provide a ‘tiny little heartbeat’ where an all-consuming black hole used to be.

“If I were to use that threadbare metaphor of albums being like children, then Push The Sky Away is the ghost-baby in the incubator,” Cave says.

The album certainly has all of the intensity of Grinderman, as with most Bad Seeds albums it could never be background music, but it seems that – instead of waiting until he is ready to burst open with rage and profanity to unleash a song – Nick Cave is easing it out a little bit at a time, in the process creating some of his most haunting, beautiful melodies to date.

Like a deranged Bob Dylan, Cave guides us through each song with some of his more obscure lyrics to date. The howling stories of characters like Jangling Jack and Stagger Lee are replaced with stream-of-consciousness musing on everything from Wikipedia to Miley Cyrus, who ends up ‘floating in a swimming pool in Taluca Lake’. The almighty Higgs Boson Blues is like a hallucinatory journey through the unconscious mind, complete with pygmies and Hannah Montana, while the title track sums up the album’s mood perfectly when Cave delivers its penultimate lines. ‘And some people say that it is just rock and roll/Oh but it gets right down to your soul’.

Push The Sky Away’s second single, Jubilee Street, is both heartbreaking and uplifting. While there are the familiar undertones of murder and prostitutes in what is probably the album’s most structured song in a narrative sense, the hypnotic guitar and Ellis’s lush violin arrangements build into a soaring, moving crescendo. Cave’s lyrics seem to address his advancing age and a sense of alienation (I was out of place and time/and over the hill/and out of my mind), but as the music rises, the singer moves into the present tense (I’m transforming/I’m vibrating/I am an embryo eating dark oxygen/I’m glowing/I’m flying/Look at me now), a refrain almost addressing the light that has evidently crept into his psyche somewhere along the line, consuming the darkness and transforming into something far more beautiful.

Cave suggested during a recent Twitter interview that the song is about rebirth, and it seems fitting that it should appear on an album that has brought the Bad Seeds out of the shadows and into something of a carte blanche. Between the disappointing reception that 2003’s Nocturama received, the violent thrashing of Grinderman, and a couple of film scores, the Bad Seeds have re-energised themselves with an album unlike anything they have done before.

Of course, Cave’s unmistakable voice still rumbles, but there is far more control in what was once a runaway train. In this sense, they have come full circle, beating off whatever demons were still clinging onto them and emerged, in their third decade as a group, as a new band.

Image by orangeintense

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