Push The Sky Away is the 15th official album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and they keep on good shape. After 30 years together, passing through Grinderman’s great project, these guys have experiments almost everything in their music, this is a band at their mature best.
After the agressive garage noise of his Grinderman project, Nick Cave and co slowed the tempo. If we have to compare Push The Sky Away with any other Nick Cave album, I would say easily, 1997’s The Boatman’s Call and 2001’s No More Shall We Part. The two singles We Know Who U R and Jubilee Street has indicated the path that this album would follow: If the previous Dig!Lazarus!Dig! was hell, Push The Sky Away is heaven!
Harvey’s departure has allowed Warren Ellis to move more to the forefront, and it is immediately perceptible in the flute of the opening track We Know Who U R. The lyrics have always been a high point of Cave’s work and in this album he didn’t disappoint. Wide Lovely Eyes rises slightly the tone but is with Water’s Edge that the intensity goes up. “But you grow old and you grow cold, Yeah you grow old and you grow cold”, carved on a threatening bass line, bursting into an eminent rage. Jubilee Street, a tale of a prostitute called Bee, can easily be one of the highpoints of the album, and after a couple of listening’s, everybody can already regard this as a classic Cave song. I’ve heard this song countless times, is already one of the best of the year; it even provides the inspiration for another song on the album, Finishing Jubilee Street.
Mermaids calm the pace again, but it’s still a pretty melodic music. We Real Cool has a hypnotic bass line, it’s a song very similar to Water’s Edge but not as aggressive on the lyrics. Tense focused once more on voice and lyrics of Nick Cave, with a good match between the piano and violin at the last third of the song. Higgs Boson Blues is another favorite, and tells a story so strange that only Nick Cave can understands it: the road to Geneva to see the Large Hadron Collider, featuring Robert Johnson, Lucifer, a Preacher, Miley Cyrus…but you can’t stop of hear this song, the voice, the band, the music…a masterpiece. Push The Sky Away ends in a very calm way, Mr. Cave throughs away another great piece of lirycs: “Some people say it’s just rock and roll / Oh, but it gets you right down to your soul / You’ve gotta keep on pushing”
One of the best albums of 2013 so far!
