eMusic Review 0
Nick Cave’s 15th album with the Bad Seeds, Push the Sky Away, doesn’t want to be a masterpiece. Sure, it’s got a couple of songs — the lilting, menacing “Jubilee Street” and the creeping, spiraling “Higgs Boson Blues” — that push past the six-minute mark, and ponders subjects as weighty as the origins of the universe and the apocalypse (in the same song, yet). But just when the Bad Seeds — minus longtime guitarist Mick Harvey, whose departure tilts Sky toward the low end — settle into a comfortably morbid groove, Cave throws a lyrics curveball. “We Real Cool,” which takes its title from a Gwendolyn Brooks poem, opens with the machine-gun stutter of a repeated bass note, with Cave sounding like a doomsaying preacher hurling words from the pulpit. But in the end, he reveals himself as just another punter with a laptop, aimlessly Googling the night away: “Sirius is 8.6 light years away/ Arcturus is 37/ The past is the past/ and it’s here to stay/ Wikipedia is heaven/ when you don’t remember anymore.”
The past, or more specifically its absence, comes up a lot on Push the Sky Away. Warren Ellis’s skittering loops, which recall the atmospheric spread… read more »
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