Push The Sky Away

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At the heart of Push the Sky Away is a naturalism and warmth that makes it the most subtly beautiful of all the Bad albums. The contemporary settings of myths, and the cultural references that have time-stamped Nick's songs of the twenty-first century mist lightly through details drawn from the life he observed around his seaside home, through the tall windows on the album's mysterious and ambiguous cover. The songs on this album took form in a modest with shellac covers over the course of almost a year. The is a treasured analogue artefact but the internet is equally important to Nick: Googling curiosities, being entranced by exotic Wikipedia entries "whether they're true or not". These songs convey how on the internet profoundly significant events, momentary fads and mystically-tinged absurdities sit side-by-side and question how we might recognise and assign weight to what's genuinely important. The album has a clarity and sweet strangeness that's built upon the refusal to accept limitations, whether they be the traditional uses and sounds of musical instruments, lyric styles, or diminished spiritual horizons. It's not always apparent what instruments the band is playing: they may be traditional musical instruments but other sounds are clearly generated by objects unrelated to musical instruments. What's being created is a collective musical language that's rich and complex. "Well, 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 and Warren's loops are its tiny, trembling heart-beat." - Nick Cave. BBC Review ---------- A couple of years after 2004’s double-album Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, Nick Cave and various Bad turned to a fledgling project they named Grinderman as a means of escaping the weight and expectation of their established act. Via some charged, deranged rock’n’roll, it accomplished exactly what its architects intended, enabling them to come on strong with 2008’s accled Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! and clear the palette for Push the Sky Away, their 15th studio album. The product of a newly reconfigured Bad (their first album without founding member Mick Harvey, who left in 2009), Cave employs the metaphor of albums as children in its press release, likening it to “the ghost-baby in the incubator” wherein “Warren [Ellis]’s loops are its tiny, trembling heart-beat”. It is certainly a far stranger, subtler record than that last Bad outing. And in its own way this is every bit as fierce and uncompromising as both Grinderman LPs. Lead single We No Who U R sets the template: a hymnal slow-burner replete with elemental imagery, it falls somewhere between simmering menace and odd, enchanting beauty. Over the following songs, Cave and his cohorts revel in this dichotomy. Wide Lovely Eyes and We Real Cool are set against ominously rumbling guitar and bass respectively; strings, piano and backing vocals have to force their way upward in the mix to let in a little light, the ensuing interplay between tension and release exquisitely wrought. “Wikipedia is heaven / When you don’t want to remember no more,” sighs Cave at one point, referencing the forays around arcane corners of the internet that influenced his songwriting. These come to the fore in Higgs Boson Blues, a psychotropic eight-minute odyssey that finds him dwelling on everything from nightmarish depictions of Lucifer and disease-carrying missionaries to Miley Cyrus. The record closes with its title track, a call-to-arms both hushed and bracing in turn. “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,” Cave asserts. It becomes increasingly evident the song is ed at himself as much as anyone, on an LP as weighty, compelling and brilliant as The Bad have ever produced. --James Skinner Find more music at the BBC ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/syn//albumreviews/-/music/ ) This link will take you off in a new window