..:: audio-music dot info ::..


Main Page      The Desert Island      Copyright Notice
 Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz


Nick Cave: Push the Sky Away

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Bad Seed Ltd.
Released: 2013.02.18
Time:
 42:40
Category: Folk
Producer(s): Nick Launay
Rating: *******... (7/10)
Media type: CD
Web address: www.nickcave.com
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2014
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] We No Who U R (N.Cave/W.Ellis) - 4:04
[2] Wide Lovely Eyes (N.Cave/W.Ellis) - 3:40
[3] Water's Edge (N.Cave/W.Ellis/T.Wydler) - 3:49
[4] Jubilee Street (N.Cave/W.Ellis) - 6:35
[5] Mermaids (N.Cave/W.Ellis) - 3:49
[6] We Real Cool (N.Cave/W.Ellis) - 4:18
[7] Finishing Jubilee Street (N.Cave/W.Ellis/T.Wydler) - 4:28
[8] Higgs Boson Blues (N.Cave/W.Ellis) - 7:50
[9] Push the Sky Away (N.Cave/W.Ellis) - 4:07

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Nick Cave - vocals, piano, electric piano, additional mixing, design
Warren Ellis - violin, viola, tenor guitar, flute, synthesizer, electric piano, loops, backing vocals, additional mixing
Martyn P. Casey - bass (1–6, 8), backing vocals
Barry Adamson - bass (7, 9), backing vocals
Conway Savage - vocals, backing vocals
Thomas Wydler - drums, backing vocals
Jim Sclavunos - percussion, backing vocals

George Vjestica - twelve-string guitar (4, 5), backing vocals (5, 8)
Chris Dauray - saxophone (8)
Jessica Neilson - bass clarinet (8)
Ryan Porter - trombone (8)
Antonio Beliveau - backing vocals (1, 3, 7, 9)
Aya Peard - backing vocals (1, 3, 7, 9)
Jason Evigan - backing vocals (1, 3, 7, 9)

Natalie Wilde - backing vocals (1, 3, 7, 9)
Martha Skye Murphy - backing vocals (1, 3, 7)
Children Of Ecole Saint Martin - backing vocals (4, 8, 9)

Nick Launay - production, recording, mixing
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - production
Kevin Paul - additional recording
Anna Laverty - additional recording, vocal engineer, recording assistant
Damien Arlot - recording assistant
Thomas Lefèbvre - recording assistant
Adam "Atom" Greenspan - mixing assistant
Tim Young - mastering
Tom Hingston - design
Dominique Issermann - photography, cover art
Cat Stevens - photography

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


Recorded on December 2011–August 2012 at La Fabrique in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France

Push the Sky Away is the fifteenth studio album by the Australian alternative rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, released on 18 February 2013 on the band's own label Bad Seed Ltd. Recorded at La Fabrique in southern France, it is the band's first album not to feature founding member Mick Harvey, who departed the band in January 2009, and the first album to feature founding member Barry Adamson since Your Funeral... My Trial (1986).



Push The Sky Away ist das vielleicht außergewöhnlichste Album der Bad Seeds.  Der Longplayer strahlt Natürlichkeit und Wärme aus, ein Werk von subtiler Schönheit. Die Songs haben über ein Jahr hinweg Gestalt angenommen in Nick Caves geliebtem Notizbuch. Das Notizbuch ist ein analoges Artefakt, doch das Internet ist für Nick Cave ebenso essentiell: Er recherchiert Kurioses via Google, ist fasziniert von exotischen Wikipedia-Einträgen, „egal ob sie wahr sind oder nicht“. Wie im Worldwide Web weltverändernde Ereignisse, vergängliche Modeerscheinungen und mythisch gefärbte Absurditäten Seite an Seite stehen, davon erzählen die neuen Songs, und sie werfen die Frage auf, wie wir erkennen und beurteilen können, was wirklich wichtig ist. Aufgenommen haben Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds Push The Sky Away in Südfrankreich mit Produzent Nick Lanay in einem Herrenhaus aus dem 19. Jahrhundert, dem Sitz des Studios La Fabrique, in dessen Hauptsaal eine riesige Sammlung Klassik-Schallplatten die Wände ziert. Nick Cave gründete die Bad Seeds 1982 nach dem Ende seiner Band The Birthday Party. Im Jahre 1984 veröffentlichten Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds ihr Debütalbum From Her To Eternity. Seitdem hat die Band 14 weitere Studioalben eingespielt, und ihr Output ist noch immer so unberechenbar und lebendig wie diese frühen, bahnbrechenden Aufnahmen aus den Hansa Studios Berlin. Zahlreiche Künstler berufen sich auf Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds; Ikonen wie Johnny Cash, Metallica oder The Arctic Monkeys haben ihre Songs gecovert.



"They've made their best album" (The Independent Album of The Week)

"An incredible album" (Sunday Mail Pick of The Week)

"A masterpiece" (NME 9/10)

"Another Seeds classic" (The Guardian)



Nick Cave gehört zu den wenigen Künstlern, deren neue Alben Offenbarungen enthalten, auf die zuvor noch niemand gekommen ist. Glaubt man zumindest, nach den Kritiken, die über sie geschrieben werden. Legt sich der Trubel wieder, greift man dann doch eher wieder auf die alten Platten zurück, auf die wütenden aus den 80er Jahren oder die eingängigeren aus den 90ern. Allen voran "Live Seeds" von 1993, nach wie vor überragend, trotz des matschigen Sounds, oder das ruhige, wenn auch nicht liebliche "The Boatman's Call" (1997).

Was nicht bedeutet, dass es keine Freude wäre, ein neues Album des Australiers in den Händen zu halten. Erst recht bei einem durchaus ansprechendem Cover wie dem vorliegenden, auf dem der Meister in seinem Schlafzimmer in seiner Wahlheimat Brighton mit seiner hüllenlosen Ehefrau zu sehen ist. Dem Exhibitionismus war Cave nie wirklich abgeneigt, wie sich auch an seiner öffentlich zelebrierten und rechtzeitig abgelegten Heroinsucht bis in die 90er hinein gezeigt hat.

Auf "Push The Sky Away" erscheint vieles wie gewohnt, einiges aber auch neu. Wie immer in den letzten Jahren hat Cave viel Zeit im Keller seines Hauses verbracht, um über neuen Texten zu brüten. Alt sind auch die Bad Seeds, die ihm treu zur Seite stehen, wenn er sie ruft. Die größte Neuigkeit besteht in der Abwesenheit Mick Harveys, der die Band 2009 mit einem lauten Türknall verlassen hat. Seit den 70er Jahren hatte er mit Cave musiziert und war weit mehr als nur der Gitarrist der Bad Seeds. Er war deren musikalischer Führer.

Diese Rolle hat nun Multi-Instrumentalist und Loop-Lieferant Warren Ellis inne. Was zu einem überraschend neuen, minimalistischen Sound geführt hat. Einerseits fehlen jene Gitarrengewitter, die nicht nur auf den Cave/Seeds Platten des neuen Jahrtausends zu hören sind, sondern auch den Reiz des begrabenen Seitenprojekts Grinderman ausmachten. Andererseits hat Ellis den Songs einen durchgängigen, konsistenten Sound verpasst, zum ersten Mal seit "The Boatman's Call".

"Das Mysterium seiner Klangwelten ist nun schon lange ein Teil unserer Musik. Aber jetzt gibt es nichts mehr, dass sie verdeckt", erklärt Cave in einem Interview mit dem Musikexpress. Die Beförderung kam dank des gemeinsam geschriebenen Soundtracks zum Kinofilm "The Proposition – Tödliches Angebot" (2005), für das Cave auch das Drehbuch verfasst hat. "Er besitzt die magische Fähigkeit, aus den verschiedensten Geräuschen dichte, stimmige Atmosphären zu schaffen". Last, but not least: Cave hat seine tiefe Erzählerstimme wieder gefunden. Hohe, weinerliche Passagen gibt es hier keine. Falls sie jemand vermisst haben sollte.

Im Opener "We No Who U R" besteht das prägende Geräusch aus wenigen geloopten Noten, die wie ein Zwitter aus Klavier und Gitarre klingen, einem unaufgeregten Bass samt Schlagzeug, einer Querflöte, einem Chor und natürlich Cave, der über Tagesbeginn und Vögelchen sinniert. Dabei hat er nicht den Verstand verloren, sondern eine neue Form des Textens ausprobiert. Vieles sei bei zufälligem Surfen im Internet entstanden, erklärt er. Er wollte diesmal keine Geschichten erzählen, sondern es sei ihm eher um die Atmosphären gegangen. Worte im Dienste der Musik, nicht umgekehrt.

Mord und Co. gibt es natürlich trotzdem. "Mylie Cyrus floats in a swimming pool in Taluca Lake / And you're the best friend I ever had / I can't remember anything at all", schließt er das vorletzte Stück "Higgs Boson Blues" ab. Ein paar Strophen davor war schon Robert Johnson mit Luzifer erschienen, "100 black babies running from his genocidal jaw."

Dazwischen leistet sich das Album keine Schwächen. Den Höhepunkt bildet "Jubilee Street" mit einer leicht verstimmten Gitarre als wichtigster Begleitung und Streichern im Mittelteil, die Musik und Hörer buchstäblich zum Schweben bringen. Filmische Elemente, die auch das fast schon religiös anmutende "Mermaids" und das verträumte, leicht bedrohliche "We Real Cool" liefern.

"Push The Sky Away" ist endlich wieder ein Cave-Album aus einem Guss. Was weniger am Frontmann als an Tausendsassa Warren Ellis liegt. Und am Umstand, dass die Aufnahmen im malerischen Studio La Fabrique im französischen Saint-Rémy de Provence stattgefunden haben. Wahrscheinlich wird sich die Band beim nächsten Album schon wieder ganz anders anhören. Doch genießen wir erst einmal das vorliegende, dessen einzige Offenbarung lautet: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds sind 30 Jahre nach ihrer Entstehung immer noch eine phantastische Band.

Giuliano Benassi - LAUT.DE



Push the Sky Away is the 15th official album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, but it could almost be their first. After 30 years together, the band has effectively come full circle, having completed its evolution from untamed beast to rock dignitary and, via the fearsome alter-ego offshoot Grinderman, back again. Factor in the recent resignation of Mick Harvey (Cave's right hand man since their Boys Next Door days in the late 1970s), and the sudden deep-sixing of Grinderman (as a recording entity, at least), and the Bad Seeds' reliably black essence now more closely resembles a blank canvas.

Push the Sky Away scans as the Bad Seeds' post-Grinderman comedown album, to be filed alongside statelier turns like 1997's The Boatman's Call and 2001's No More Shall We Part. But where the Bad Seeds' mellow records usually find Cave in pensive, piano-man mode, Push the Sky Away presents an uncharacteristically weightless, eerily atmospheric sound; in lieu of crossover ballads like "Into My Arms" and "People Ain't No Good", we have foggy reveries built upon ominously rumbling bass lines, twitchy rhythmic tics, and hushed-voice intimations. It may not erupt with same force as the Bad Seeds' stormiest gestures, but the underlying menace fuelling it remains.

The approach bears the influence of Grinderman as much as the Bad Seeds' decidedly more raucous 2008 release, Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!. Though Grinderman was often seen as the Bad Seeds' wild child offspring, it was also a vehicle through which Cave and his increasingly prominent foil, Warren Ellis, could experiment with textures and loops (to the point of spawning a remix album). These production intricacies form the bedrock of Push the Sky Away, which is less a showcase for Bad Seeds' powerhouse prowess than a reconstructed fever-dream memory of it, transmuting the familiar into something foreign. There's a sense of the Bad Seeds expanding their sound and unlearning it at the same time. (Drummer Jim Sclavunos wins the Take One for the Team Award here, tempering his usual thunderous thrust for stragetically timed snare-rim taps and brushed-skin driftiness.)

The freer, more exploratory bent extends to Cave's lyric sheet. True to the album's desolate, dead-of-night air, his songs are less narratively focussed, more stream-of-consciousness haze, countering Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!'s gritty urban milieu with impressionistic images of mermaids and the sea that reinforce the sense of a mind floating away. Tellingly, Cave has said his writing for the album was inspired by "Googling curiosities," and his lyrical logic follows the same circuitous path as an extended, after-hours web-surfing session, bouncing between subjects profound and frivolous, indulging life-long obsessions and newfound, fleeting fascinations. Bad Seeds albums used to inspire you to reacquaint yourself with folk tales and the Old Testament; this one will have you brushing up on quantum physics, astronomy, and "Hannah Montana".

That last bit shouldn't come as a surprise: Over the past decade, Cave has shown a greater eagerness to interact with contemporary pop culture, from the Oprah shout-out on Grinderman's "Kitchenette" to the comically perverse Avril Lavigne fixation that formed a subplot in his 2009 novel, The Death of Bunny Munro. But where these namedrops have felt like humourous incongruities in Cave's fire-and-brimstone universe, Push the Sky Away straight-facedly acknowledges how modern phenomena like Wikipedia and Miley Cyrus hold as much sway over the populace as the Bible and Robert Johnson once did, while translating brooding ballads into text-speak and slang ("We No Who U R"). And where more recent Bad Seeds standouts like Abattoir Blues' "There She Goes, My Beautiful World" and Lazarus' "We Call Upon the Author" saw Cave writing songs about writing songs, Push the Sky Away goes one meta: The album's most elaborate track, "Jubilee Street", is answered by "Finishing Jubilee Street", a spartan, spoken-word account of a dream Cave had just after he completed work on the former.

For all the album's wandering spirit, the first eight tracks on Push the Sky Away are neatly structured into two complementary, four-song halves that mirror one another: each comes outfitted with an ominous opening salvo ("We No Who U R", "Mermaids"), an icy glare that thaws into an open-hearted address ("Wide Lovely Eyes", "We Real Cool"), and a scenery-chewing set piece ("Water's Edge", "Finishing Jubilee Street") that hearkens back to early Bad Seeds storytelling turns like "The Carny". (Fittingly, original bassist Barry Adamson rejoined the band following the album's recording.) The simmering tension of each side is eventually unleashed through a slow-boiling, show-stopping epic. The aforementioned "Jubilee Street" is built upon a repeated "Hey Joe"-like chord progression that, thanks to Ellis' mesmerizing violin lines, grows more grandiose with each passing cycle, reaching such dizzying heights that you almost forget you're listening to a song about a murdered prostitute. But even that pales in comparison to side two's colossal "Higgs Boson Blues", which begins as a solitary 3 a.m. strum in the vein of Neil Young's "On the Beach" but, over seven writhing minutes, ends up traversing the entirety of modern history, from "the missionary with his small pox and flu" to the birth of the Devil's music to the anticipated death of a certain teen-pop starlet who "floats in a swimming pool."

"Higgs Boson Blues" is named for the elementary particle whose discovery last year was hailed as the most significant breakthrough in contemporary physics, one that essentially provides the missing piece in explaining the structure of our entire universe. But its discovery after 50 years of intense research has also led to something of an existential crisis among physicists, who are now left with no theory to prove, and asking themselves, "What now?" One can imagine Nick Cave asking himself the same question as he entered his fourth decade fronting a deviant rock band that had seemingly mined every last shade of noir. But in this album's quietly defiant title-track denouement, he finds a renewed mission statement: "If you got everything and you don't want no more/ You've got to just keep on pushing, keep on pushing/ Push the sky away." Because when you can't see the sky, you can't see your limits.

Stuart Berman - Pitchfork.com



"Die Pause hat sich gelohnt, denn Cave und seine Mitstreiter legen nach drei eher durchschnittlichen Alben die hohe Qualität früherer Tage vor. (...) Gitarren spielen nur mehr eine untergeordnete, zumeist perkussive Rolle, im Vordergrund stehen Geige, Klavier, Fender Rhodes und natürlich Caves Stimme – alles schön gediegen und angenehm antiquiert."

(Good Times, April / Mai 2013)



"Ein ruhiges, beinahe meditatives Album voller Streicherzucker, zart gezupfter Gitarren und leicht grollendem Bass, das durch Caves faszinierenden Sprechgesang einen hypnotischen Sog entwickelt."

(stereoplay, März 2013)



Nick Cave certainly knows his way around an evocative phrase. "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," he says. This is, quite staggeringly, the 15th Bad Seeds record. Recorded in France and produced by Nick Launay (who produced the last three Bad Seeds records, not to mention the Grinderman albums), it is apparently the product of much Wikipedia-surfing and not a little Googling. Perhaps this is the reason why Cave told the Guardian's Simon Hattenstone to "just Google it" whenever he asked him a question when they met back in 2008. Push The Sky Away is a world away from Grinderman's brutal sound. Instead it finds the Bad Seeds in stately mode, and contains some of their most beautiful melodies to date. We'll have a full review for you to pore over at the end of the week. For now, have a listen using the player above (if you're reading on mobile, see the desktop version of this page) and let us know your thoughts!

The Guardian



It's been nearly five years since Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds issued the manic, intense rock cabaret that was Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! Since then, the formation and breakup of Grinderman yielded two studio offerings, and Cave and Warren Ellis have composed a few film scores. Push the Sky Away, produced by Nick Launay, is painted with a deliberately limited sonic palette by Ellis. The album's sequencing makes it feel like a long, moody suite. While most of these songs contain simple melodies and arrangements that offer the appearance of vulnerability and tenderness, it is inside this framework that they eventually reveal their sharp fangs and malcontent. Opener -- and first single -- "We No Who U R" is reminiscent of "Your Funeral, My Trial" in its intent, but musically Ellis' sparse loops, flute, and a backing vocal chorus lend it an elegiac feel that belies the threat in the lyric. "Water's Edge," with its rumbling bassline, eerie piano, and Ellis' droning violin loops, is more overt in its sinister menace. Its protagonist, full of rage at seeing the dance of romance among the young, warns: "It's the will of love/It's the thrill of love/It's the chill of love/Comin' on." "We Real Cool" uses that thrumming bassline too. Instantly taut, one awaits an explosion that never arrives -- musically. Here, and elsewhere on this recording, the listener is exhorted to walk an emotional tightrope between the human qualities in Cave's characters as speaking subjects and the more distasteful, disgusting traits that make them objects of repulsion. He doesn't judge. "Finishing Jubilee Street" features Ellis' electric guitar in bluesy resonance as it drones atop a strummed 12-string acoustic before layered strings begin marching toward a dramatic catharsis. "Higgs Boson Blues," the set's longest cut, uses the drum kit and electric guitars in a similarly long, formless blues that displays Cave in near rant mode; his black humor is evident inside sociological observations with Miley Cyrus and Hannah Montana as characters. "Mermaids" employs humor too; from the start nearly obscene, it moves beyond its joke and becomes both a love song and a romantic elegy about the disappearance of the place of myth in Western spiritual life. Cave's protagonist believes in them all and laments them like an abandoned lover. The title track rises from the ether, driven by guest (and former Bad Seed) Barry Adamson's bassline and Ellis' eerie organ, which takes the foreground. It's a paean of determination in the face of grievous loss. Push the Sky Away is the first Bad Seeds record without Mick Harvey; the inherent lyricism and relative lushness in his musical arrangements are missed here. Despite excellent songs, this album feels more like an extension of Cave and Ellis' cinematic work than a classic Bad Seeds record. The sonic sea change is deliberate; but historically, given their vastly musical nature, this more economical approach is jarring, though seductive.

Thom Jurek - AllMusic.com



At the heart of Push the Sky Away is a naturalism and warmth that makes it the most subtly beautiful of all the Bad Seeds 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 notebook with shellac covers over the course of almost a year. The notebook 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



A couple of years after 2004’s double-album Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, Nick Cave and various Bad Seeds 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 acclaimed Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! and clear the palette for Push the Sky Away, their 15th studio album. The product of a newly reconfigured Bad Seeds (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 Seeds 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 aimed at himself as much as anyone, on an LP as weighty, compelling and brilliant as The Bad Seeds have ever produced.

James Skinner - BBC Review



As frontman of The Birthday Party, The Bad Seeds and Grinderman, and through incarnations as actor, screenwriter and author, Nick Cave has spent the last 30 years carving a reputation as rock’s great polymath. His great vocal screeds, steeped in literature and religion, make hell on Earth sound as exhilarating as an acid trip at the funfair, with some beautifully desolate ballads about love, loss and heartbreak chucked in as a bonus.

What’s remarkable is that, after 30 years, a new wind blows through ‘Push The Sky Away’. Like the impatient sea air of Cave’s Brighton home, there’s a sense of change that gusts through the band’s 15th studio album, as it ventures into natural catastrophe (‘We No Who U R’), scientific discovery (‘Higgs Boson Blues’) and ravaging tides (‘Water’s Edge’).

It’s their first album since multi-instrumentalist and Cave’s longest collaborator Mick Harvey left. That, perhaps, is why violinist Warren Ellis takes an even more pivotal role – which feels more in key with Cave and Ellis’ magnificently bleak soundtrack to John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, than the cock-swaggering garage rock of Grinderman and 2008’s ‘Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!’. Recent interviews suggest Cave was tiring of the swampy blues of ‘…Lazarus…’ - “You play a song, and everyone’s grabbing a fuckin’ maraca, y’know?” he said. So it’s no surprise its follow-up is starker, steeped in cinematic strings (‘Jubilee Street’), lush harmonies (‘We No Who U R’), and futuristic clatter from unidentifiable instruments.

‘Wide Lovely Eyes’ is as heart-swelling as any of Cave’s greatest love songs, but like much on the album there’s a sense of agitation to its terse guitar throbs and space-age warbles. Factory clangs add a suspenseful feel to ‘We No Who U R’ (text-speak from one of rock’s greatest lyricists?) as Cave sings post-apocalyptically of charred trees stood like “pleading hands”. He hasn’t, it’s clear, lost touch with the mythical (“I believe in God, I believe in mermaids too”), nor the religious (girls stand with “legs wide to the world like bibles open”). But there’s a sense that the characters on ‘Push The Sky Away’ are closer in time and space: take the boys on Brighton beach, trying to get the attention of city girls with “white strings floating from their ears”, and the lyrical cameo from Disney’s Hannah Montana in the darkly comic ‘Higgs Boson Blues’.

What Cave and co have managed here is no mean feat: a masterpiece that merges the experimentation and freedom of their side projects with Cave’s most tender songcraft. “Some people say it’s just rock’n’roll”, he concludes, with a sentimentality that’s almost syrupy, on ‘Push The Sky Away’, “but it gets you right down to your soul”. Amen.

Jenny Stevens - NME.com
© 1996-2014 Time Inc. (UK) Ltd.



Zunächst hat Nick Cave die Vorhänge zurückgezogen, um uns eine langbeinige nackte Frau in einem leeren Zimmer zu zeigen. Er selbst trägt wie immer einen untadeligen Anzug. Aber das leere, weiße Zimmer: Wäre der Raum abgewohnt und in der Grundfarbe bräunlich – man würde sofort an den „Letzten Tango in Paris“ denken, Marlon Brandos schweinisch-bizarren Abschied von den Dingen des Lebens.

Doch statt der fatalistischen Ekstase im Kamelhaarmantel erleben wir die merkwürdig heißkalten Genüsse des Rezitators Cave. Die Bad Seeds sind heruntergestimmt auf Orgel, Glockenspiel und Harmoniegesänge:„And we know there’s no need to forgive“, wiederholt Cave in ,,We No Who U R“. „It’s the will of love/ It’s the thrill of love/ Ah but the chill of love is comin’ on“, verkündet er in „Water’s Edge“. „But you grow old and you grow cold.“ Der Romantiker als feierlicher Minimalist, reduziert auf Rhythmus und kleine Verschiebungen in der musikalischen Struktur.

„Jubilee Street“ weckt aus der faszinierenden Starre der ers­ten drei Stücke, steigert sich um eine kräftige Bass-Figur und die Violine von Warren Ellis wie ein Song der Tindersticks, gewinnt an Lautstärke und Dringlichkeit. Bei „Mermaids“ herrscht erstmals das typische Bad-Seeds-Flirren, das ozeanische Dräuen: „I believe in God/ I believe in mermaids, too/ I believe in seventy two virgins/ On a chain, why not why not.“ Dann deklamiert Cave das Stück „We Real Cool“ zu Thomas Wydlers pochenden Drums, das Klavier ertönt, die Geige simmert. Das alles wirkt wie eine protestantische Veranstaltung: Der dionysische Krach von Grinderman, aber auch die bodenlose Soundtrack-Musik mit Warren Ellis sind weit entfernt. Wie bei keiner anderen Platte vertraut Nick Cave der kleinen Melodie, der schlichten Form, dem subtilen Spiel des Schlagwerks. „Finishing Jubilee Street“ ist sogar fast Eno/Byrne – oder eine Probe-Session in Rhythmik und Chorgesang.

Und dann kommt doch noch das Stück, nach dem sich der Cave-Liebhaber sehnt. Es ist wieder die vielleicht doch tödlich ernst gemeinte Verbindung aus geheimnisvoller, bedrohlicher Noir-Erzählung, erotischer Verheißung und der Möglichkeit eines schrecklichen, wahrscheinlich letalen Unfalls. Der Blues, der alte Abgrund: immer auch eine Lachnummer bei Cave. „I’m going down to Geneva baby/ Gonna teach it to you.“ Der „Higgs Boson Blues“ ist eine sinnfrei gereimte und ausgesprochen lustige Suada: „Hannah Montana does the African Savannah/ As the simulated rainy season begins“, blödelt der Troubadour. „Rainy days always make me sad/ Miley Cyrus floats in an swimming pool in Taluca Lake/ And you’re the best girl I’ve ever had/ Can’t remember anything at all.“ Der kirre Song gehört bestimmt zu den zehn besten Stücken in Caves Repertoire: „Tupelo“, „We Came Along This Road“, „My Sorrowful Wife“, „Lime Tree Arbour“, „Hallelujah“, diese Klasse. Und „Push The Sky Away“? Top Five.

14. Februar 2013 - Arne Willander
ROLLING STONE



The gothic predilections of Nick Cave have always betrayed a Southern tinge. Perhaps it was the vast spaces of his native Australia or the literary household of his childhood, but the easy scares of Bela Lugosi or Horace Walpole seemed not for the lad of Warracknabeal. Far more prevalent over his remarkably consistent 30-year career are obsessions shared with authors such as Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers: detached eroticism, prophecy, salvation, the grotesque, the uncanny, and the folly of man. Foremost among his traits is a fascination with the past that avoids nostalgia even while ransacking a global cultural heritage, from the blues and Appalachian folk to Weimar cabaret and chanson balladeers. If and when this borrowing works, it's thanks to hard-sell techniques the artist in question has exploited since first stunning Melbourne audiences with the Birthday Party's junkie-preacher-from-hell shtick.

Yet what's surprising about Push the Sky Away, the first new Bad Seeds release since 2008's Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! (and 15th overall), is how cautiously it breaks with tradition, especially given the supporting lineup's altered state. The album serves as a decisive end to Cave's long-running relationships with Mute Records and, more intimately, former guitarist and collaborator Mick Harvey, who recently terminated their three-decade partnership. While the Bad Seeds have always served the whims of its frontman, Harvey's departure marked the first time Cave could claim status as the sole founding member. And despite original bassist Barry Adamson's semi-return, that tear in the fabric was a reminder of how steadfastly this band worked at establishing a sonic identity, the mirror opposite of Mark E. Smith's bravura claim that "if it's me and yer granny on bongos, it's the Fall." With guitarist Blixa Bargeld likewise removed from the ranks, it's left to Dirty Three violinist Warren Ellis to serve as primary musical voice, with his drum loops and electronics giving the album its gauzy shimmer, some distance removed from the Dionysian garage rock of Cave's recent Grinderman records.

Not that autumnal moods are Bad Seeds rarities. Despite a reputation for sonic terrorism, ever since the calm waters of 1990's The Good Son baffled a subset of his audience, Cave's output has trended bucolic, a shift from Old to New Testament. And even in a career filled with expansive balladry, there are moments on Push the Sky Away as lovely as anything in his repertoire, from the music-box piano chimes of "We No Who U R" to the "Dress Rehearsal Rag"-strings on "We Real Cool" and the dulcet choruses of "Finishing Jubilee Street" and "Wide Lovely Eyes." While Cave himself would likely admit he's far too New World to fully access the faux-Euro finesse of such idols as Scott Walker, the days of banshee howls and hammy Jim Morrison set pieces are long gone. While this lapsed Anglican still accesses evangelical fervor to make his points, he's more comfortable murmuring like Leonard Cohen (a portentous "Water's Edge") or barking out the talking blues a la Lou Reed (the slow burn of "Jubilee Street"). And blues there are: He routinely returns to the inspirational font of John Lee Hooker, whose iconic boogie scratch shows up throughout.

Of course, fans and detractors alike often claim that Cave's operatics and dinner-theater antics unfairly overwhelm his poetic gifts, but the verse on display here is a show of its own. True, scraps of doggerel are sprinkled throughout — "She was a catch / We were a match / I was the match that would fire up her snatch" is a low point. But the literary gifts of this twice-published author are genuine, and many stanzas reward the close readings demanded of page poets. Note a Gwendolyn Brooks-citing "We Real Cool," or the Blakean echo "Grow old / Grow cold" in "Water's Edge," or the lecherous Victorian of "Jubilee Street" comically agonizing over his blue balls that ache "a 10-ton catastrophe on a 60-pound chain."

Such amorous concerns slightly belie Cave's claims that the inspiration for Push the Sky Away came from a notebook filled with jottings on the ephemeral nature of Wikipedia dead ends and the general new-media conundrum of sorting the significant from the insignificant: In addition to Moll Bee of Jubilee Street, one notes flirtatious mermaids waving just offshore, city girls tempting yokels with "legs wide to the world / like bibles open," and multiple allusions to the houri of Islamic paradise ("Wide Lovely Eyes," "72 virgins on a chain"). There's also, you know, the cover. But he knows how to make his quirky research pay dividends, too, populating a dream sequence with a bride named Mary Stanford, an homage to a lifeboat of the same name that capsized off the coast of Rye, decimating the labor force of an East Sussex fishing village whose geography claims nearly as many mermaid references as this siren-choked album.

That's a rather droll joke, if indeed it was intended as one. Cave's keen sense of humor gets routinely marginalized, so it's disappointing to note the presence of only one real comic turn in the oversize tradition of past triumphs like Goth send-up "Release the Bats," trad/arr desecration "Stagger Lee," or Miltonian charge "We Call Upon the Author to Explain." But at nearly eight minutes, "Higgs Boson Blues" serves as a shaggy-dog centerpiece worthy of Bob Dylan stuck inside Mobile, and not merely thanks to clever throwaway lines like, "Here comes Lucifer / With his canon law." Croaking casually over a minor-key lope, some everyman asks, "Have you ever heard about the Higgs Boson blues?" before bragging about going down to Geneva as if he's laid plans to swing by Rosedale on his way to the Large Hadron Collider. Robert Johnson, the Lorraine Hotel of Memphis, and Hannah Montana in the African Savannah pass in the night before the narrative fades on an image of Miley Cyrus soaking in her Toluca Lake swimming pool. It's all keyed to levels of absurdity wholly appropriate to any cautionary tale of man's dalliances with the God particle.

It's also exactly the kind of high/low dichotomy we've come to expect from a rock figure who'll chat about Strindberg's prose works before dredging up something called "No Pussy Blues." So remember that nearly everything he says cuts both ways. When Push the Sky Away's atmospheric title cut signals the album's end, Cave trots out a familiar trope: "Some people say it's just rock'n'roll / But it gets you right down to your soul." He mutters this like he’s staking out the moral high ground, which might be the best joke of this particular batch. As always, just beyond Cave's solemnity, there's wicked and lovely fun to be had.

February 18 2013, by Jason Gubbels
© 2014 SPIN



Even when he was a fresh-faced punk, Nick Cave never sounded like a fresh-faced punk. Back on those Birthday Party records, he sounded like a wizened, apocalyptic rage-prophet. And over the course of god knows how many albums since then, he’s only grown into that voice. Cave’s records might not have the same world-blasted intensity that they once did, but he’s one of our most reliable sources of dark and bloody-minded religious-death imagery. It’s easy to say that Cave’s two albums with the cantankerous noise-garage side project Grinderman brought him back to the hate-stare evilness that had once animated him. But if you take a long, hard look at Cave’s discography, it’s shockingly low on weak points. His intensity may have waxed and waned over the years, but the fundamental power of his music has been surprisingly steady for decades now. And so Push The Sky Away, Cave’s new one with the Bad Seeds, is merely one more very good album in a long, long string of them.

The last Bad Seeds album, 2008's Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, was more or less Grinderman 1.5, an extension of that band’s depraved old-man frenzy. So Push The Sky Away is the first Cave album since the Lyre Of Orpheus half of the 2004 Bad Seeds double album that’s moved Cave back to a sort of beauty-embracing folk-blues controlled burn — a sound that, at times, comes across almost respectable. That hasn’t always worked out for Cave; albums like 2001's No More Shall We Part, low on blood and thunder, are among his least interesting (though even those are still pretty good). But that first Grinderman album did change things to an extent, or maybe it marked a change in Cave. It showed a Cave with a new obsession: His own advancing age and, by extension, his perceived inability to hook up with hordes of young women whenever he wanted. The Cave of those two Grinderman albums was an angry old lech, one who seemed to think the universe was playing a cruel trick on him. And that extends to Push The Sky Away, a powerful album-length evocation of what it’s like to be a depressed (but also angry) old lech.

That persona, on its own, isn’t particularly interesting. A depressed (and also angry) old lech was the character at the center of Cave’s godawful 2009 novel The Death Of Bunny Munro, one of my least pleasurable reading experiences in recent years. And on the page, Cave’s Push The Sky Away lyrics can be a bit much: Images of women far away, across bodies of water, far away like distant galaxies, mermaids waving from banks. “Water’s Edge” seems to be a weird societal fable about girls’ asses inspiring men to become hateful inhuman fighting machines, and you could probably make an argument that old man Cave does as much to lyrically dehumanize women as, say, Rick Ross. But Cave’s voice is a hell of an instrument, a craggy and scarily-assured burr that savors its sibilants and takes on Southern-preacher emphasis-levels at will. That voice is so willfully skeezy and malevolently alien that I can’t help but hear Cave’s on-record persona as one more character in Cave’s self-created universe of bad faith and weaponized longing. Most of the album blurs together into a sinister goth-blues throb, and it’s so snarly and evocative that I feel like I’m in a rain-slick cum-smelling back alleyway even when it’s just my office on a sunny morning.

But a few songs from the album veer away from that evilness toward real beauty, lending cracks of vulnerability to Cave’s whole persona. This is the first Bad Seeds album that Cave has made since longtime consigliere Mick Harvey left the band, and Cave’s swamp-monster-looking Grinderman co-conspirator Warren Ellis has now stepped up as his right-hand man. Cave and Ellis have already made a lot of (pretty great) film music together, and Cave credits Ellis’s loops as the main musical influence on Push The Sky Away. Those loops, when they get enough room, make for some powerfully heavy atmosphere, and sometimes they whack you with absolute prettiness out of nowhere. “Wide Lovely Eyes” is Cave’s version of an introspective street-corner doo-wop lament, and it’s easily my favorite song here. “Finishing Jubilee Street” — a song that, in a rare meta touch, has Cave singing about writing “Jubilee Street,” an entirely different song, before describing a nightmare — starts with spare menace before adding in some shivery backup vocals that push the song to another level. And the album-closing title track is expertly-executed minimal goth, a low-key goosebumps-up pulse that doesn’t need drums or guitar-fuzz to keep its grip on your throat. Nick Cave is 57 now, and he seems likely to keep writing songs this stickily seductive for another couple of decades. We’re very lucky to have him.

Tom Breihan - www.stereogum.com
 

 L y r i c s


We No Who U R

The tree don't care what the little bird sings
We go down with the dew in the morning light
The tree don't know what the little bird brings
We go down with the dew in the morning

And we breathe it in
There is no need to forgive
Breathe it in
There is no need to forgive

The trees will stand like pleading hands
We go down with the dew in the morning light
The trees all stand like pleading hands
We go down with the dew in the morning

And we breathe it in
There is no need to forgive
Breathe it in
There is no need to forgive

The trees will burn with blackened hands
We returned with the light of the evening
The trees will burn with blackened hands
Nowhere to rest, no where to land

We know who you are
We know where you live
And we know there's no need to forgive

We know who you are
We know where you live
And we know there's no need to forgive

We know who you are
We know where you live
And we know there's no need to forgive

We know who you are
We know where you live
And we know there's no need to forgive... again


Wide Lovely Eyes

You wave at the sky with wild lovely eyes
Waves and waves of love goodbye
And through the garden with your secret key
Down the tunnel that leads to the sea
Step on the beach beneath the iron sky
You wave and wave with your wild lovely eyes
Crystal waves and waves of love
You wave and say goodbye

Your dress size with your wild lovely strides
And all along the street and lately the stories abound
They've dismantled the fun fair and they've shut down the rides
And they've hung the mermaids from the streetlights by their hair
And with wild lovely eyes you wave at the sky
And me at the high window watching the ride
The waves of blue and the waves of love
You wave and say goodbye

The night expands, I am expanding
I watch your hands like butterflies bending
All among the myths and the legends we create
And all the laughing stories we tell our friends
Close the windows, clear up the mess
It's getting late, it's darker and closer to the end

Through the tunnel and down to the sea
And on that pebble beach, your laces you untie
And arrange your shoes side by side
You wave and wave with your wide lovely eyes
Distant waves and waves of distant love
You wave and say goodbye


Water's Edge

They take apart their bodies like toys for the local boys
Because they're always there at the edge of the water
They come from the capitol, these city girls go way down
Where the stones meet the sea
And all you young girls where do you hide
Down by the water, in the restless tide

And the local boys hide on the mound and watch
Reaching for the speech and the word to be heard
And the boys grow hard, hard to be heard
Hard to be heard as they reach for the speech
And search for the word on the water's edge
But you grow old and you grow cold
Yea you grow old and you grow cold

They would come in their hordes, these city girls
With white strings flowing from their ears
As the local boys behind the mound
Think long and hard about the girls from the capitol
Who dance at the water's edge, shaking their asses
And all you young lovers where do you hide
Down by the water, in the restless tide

With a bible of tricks they do with their legs
The girls reach for the speech and the speech to be heard
To be hard, the local boys teem down the mound
And seize the girls from the capitol
Who shriek at the edge of the water
Shriek to speak, and reach for the speech
Reach for the speech to be heard
But you grow old and you grow cold
Yea you grow old and you grow cold
You grow old

Their legs wide to the world like bibles open
To be speared and taking their bodies apart like toys
They dismantle themselves by the water's edge
And reach for the speech and the wide wide world
Ah, God knows our local boys

It's the will of love
It's the thrill of love
Ah, but the chill of love is coming on

It's the will of love
It's the thrill of love
Ah but the chill of love is coming on

It's the will of love
It's the thrill of love
Ah but the chill of love is coming down, people


Jubilee Street

On Jubilee Street there was a girl named Bee
She had a history but she had no past
When they shut her down the Russians moved in
Now I'm too scared, I'm too scared to even walk on past

She used to say all those good people down on Jubilee Street
They ought to practice what they preach
Yeah they ought to practice just what they preach
Those good people on Jubilee Street

And here I come up the hill, I'm pushing my wheel of love
I got love in my tummy and a tiny little pain
And a 10 ton catastrophe on a 60 pound chain
And I'm pushing my wheel of love up Jubilee Street
Ah, look at me now

The problem was she had a little black book
And my name was written on every page
Well a girl's got to make ends meet even down on Jubilee Street
I was out of place and time and over the hill and out of my mind
On Jubilee Street

I ought to practice what I preach
These days I go downtown in my tie and tails
I got a foetus on a leash

I am alone now
I am beyond recriminations
Curtains are shut
Furniture has gone
I'm transforming
I'm vibrating
I'm glowing
I'm flying
Look at me now
I'm flying
Look at me now


Mermaids

She was a catch,
We were a match
I was the match that would fire up her snatch
There was a catch
I was no match
I was fired from her crutch
Now I sit around and watch
The mermaids sun themselves out on the rocks
They are beyond our touch
I watch and watch
Wave at me
They wave at me
They wave and slip
Back into the sea

All the ones who come
All the ones who go
Down to the water
All the ones who come
All the ones who go
Down to the sea

I believe in God
I believe in mermaids too
I believe in 72 virgins on a chain (why not, why not)
I believe in the rapture
For I've seen your face
On the floor of the ocean
At the bottom of the ray

I do drive a relentless course
I do husband alertness course
I do mermaid alertness course
Watch them out on the rocks
Wave at me
Wave at me
They wave and slip
Back into the sea

All the ones who come
All the ones who go
Down to the water
All the ones who come
And all the ones who go
Down to the sea

For all the ones who come
And all the ones who go
Down to the water
All the ones who come
And all the ones who go
Down to the sea


We Real Cool

Who took your measurements?
From your toes to the top of your head
Yea, you know
Who bought you clothes and new shoes
And wrote you a book you never read
Yea, you know

Who was it, yeah you know, we real cool
On the far side of the morning,
Who was it, yeah you know, we real cool
Now I hope you're listening, are you?

Who was it you called the good shepherd,
Rounding up the kids for their meal
Who chased your shadow running out behind
Clinging to your high flying heels
Your high flying, high flying, high flying heels

Who was it, yeah you know, we real cool
On the far side of the morning, who was it
Yeah you know, we real cool
And I hope you're listening too

Who measured the distance from the planets
Right down to your big blue spinning world
And heartbeats and tears and nervous laughter
Spilling down all over you, girl

Who was it, yeah you know, we real cool
And the world keeps on turning
Who was it, yeah you know, we real cool
And I hope you're listening, are you?

Sirius is 8.6 light years away
Arcturas is 37
The past is the past and it's here to stay
Wikipedia's heaven
When you don't want to remember, you know
On the far side of the morning
Who was it, yea you know, we real cool
And I hope you hear me, and you'll call
Yeah, we real cool
Yeah, we real, real cool


Finishing Jubilee Street

I'd just finished writing "Jubilee Street"
I laid down on my bed and fell into a deep sleep
And when I awoke, I believed I'd taken a bride called Mary Stanford
And I flew into a frenzy searching high and low
Because in my dream the girl was very young

I said, "Hey little girl, where do you hide?
You draw lightning from the sky"

All of this and her dark hair
All of this and her dark hair, oh Lord

See that girl
Comin' on down
Comin' on down
Comin' on down

See that girl
Comin' on down
Comin' on down
Comin' on down

Last night your shadow scampered up the wall, it flied
It leaped like a black spider between your legs, and cried
My children
My children
They are lost to us

All of this and her dark hair, oh Lord
All of this and her dark hair, oh Lord

See that girl
Comin' on down
Comin' on down
Comin' on down

See that girl
Comin' on down
Comin' on down
Comin' on down

See that girl
Comin' on down
Comin' on down
Comin' on down

See that girl
Comin' on down
Comin' on down
Comin' on down


Higgs Boson Blues

Can't remember anything at all
Flame trees line the streets
Can't remember anything at all
But I'm driving my car down to Geneva

I've been sitting in my basement patio
Aye, it was hot
Up above, girls walk past, the roses all in bloom
Have you ever heard about the Higgs Boson blues
I'm goin' down to Geneva baby, gonna teach it to you

Who cares, who cares what the future brings?
Black road long and I drove and drove
I came upon a crossroad
The night was hot and black
I see Robert Johnson,
With a ten dollar guitar strapped to his back,
Lookin' for a tune

Well here comes Lucifer,
With his canon law,
And a hundred black babies runnin' from his genocidal jaw
He got the real killer groove
Robert Johnson and the devil man
Don't know who's gonna rip off who

Driving my car, flame trees on fire
Sitting and singin' the Higgs Boson blues,
I'm tired, I'm lookin' for a spot to drop
All the clocks have stopped in Memphis now
In the Lorraine Motel, it's hot, it's hot
That's why they call it the Hot Spot
I take a room with a view
Hear a man preaching in a language that's completely new, yea
Making the hot cocks in the flophouse bleed
While the cleaning ladies sob into their mops
And a bellhop hops and bops
A shot rings out to a spiritual groove
Everybody bleeding to that Higgs Boson Blues

If I die tonight, bury me
In my favorite yellow patent leather shoes
With a mummified cat and a cone-like hat
That the caliphate forced on the Jews
Can you feel my heartbeat?
Can you feel my heartbeat?

Hannah Montana does the African Savannah
As the simulated rainy season begins
She curses the queue at the Zulus
And moves on to Amazonia
And cries with the dolphins
Mama ate the pygmy
The pygmy ate the monkey
The monkey has a gift that he is sending back to you
Look here comes the missionary
With his smallpox and flu
He's saving them savages
With his Higgs Boson Blues
I'm driving my car down to Geneva
I'm driving my car down to Geneva

Oh let the damn day break
The rainy days always make me sad
Miley Cyrus floats in a swimming pool in Toluca Lake
And you're the best girl I've ever had
Can't remember anything at all


Push The Sky Away

I was ridin', I was ridin', oh
The sun, the sun, the sun was rising from the field

I got a feeling I just can't shake
I got a feeling that just won't go away
You've got it, just keep on pushing and, keep on pushing and
Push the sky away

And if your friends think that you should do it different
And if they think that you should do it the same
You've got it, just keep on pushing and, keep on pushing and
Push the sky away

And if you feel you got everything you came for
If you got everything and you don't want no more
You've got it, just keep on pushing and, keep on pushing and
Push the sky away

And some people say it's just rock 'n' roll
Aw, but it gets you right down to your soul
You've got it, just keep on pushing and, keep on pushing and
Push the sky away

You've got it, just keep on pushing and, keep on pushing and
Push the sky away

You've got it, just keep on pushing and, keep on pushing and
Push the sky away

 M P 3   S a m p l e s


Currently no Samples available!