CD Reviews

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds | Push The Sky Away

Bad Seed Ltd. (2013)

By ZETH LUNDY | February 20, 2013

2.5 Stars

In which the 50-something singer-songwriter, nearly a decade into a semi-feverish creative rebirth, rips it up and starts again. Gone are the debauched blooze pangs of Bad Seed offshoot Grinderman, gone are the ecstatic hallelujahs of Abattoir Blues. Gone, too, is guitarist Mick Harvey, leaving Nick Cave as the band's sole original member. Much like the similarly low-key The Boatman's Call, Cave's highly anticipated 15th album with the Bad Seeds manages the puzzling feat of making a great band seem inconsequential, if not entirely absent. To put a more positive spin on it: bubbling tracks like "Water's Edge" and "We Real Cool" thrive on sparse arrangements, brooding tension, and oblique lyrical details; the band is there, waiting to strike. "Jubilee Street," the record's high point and current single, boasts not only narrative, but gorgeous melodic release in the form of Warren Ellis's violin. See also: "Higgs Boson Blues," quite nearly a classic Cave run-on, a vehicle for a modest choir of manly men, and a blues tune for a post–Large Hadron Collider world. When the so-called suspense is merely lackluster, as in the dull opener "We No Who U R" and the closing title track, Cave's usual alertness turns into a meandering lack of focus. Push the Sky Away feels heavy on breath-taking and woodshedding, an album of waiting for sparks to ignite. "She was a catch/We were a match/I was the match that would fire up her snatch," he notes with gusto in the ballad "Mermaids," fondly recalling those moments of inspired decadence, though not recreating them.

» ZETHLUNDY@GMAIL.COM

Alex Chilton | Free Again: The ''1970'' Sessions
Post–Box Tops and pre-Big Star, Alex Chilton was an 18-year-old Memphis boy on his way to his dual identity: former #1 pop hitmaker, perpetual underground hero.
Cardinal | Hymns
After a nearly two-decade silence, chamber-pop duo Cardinal emerge from their near-mythic hibernation with the sleepy-eyed, Beatles-underwater gem "Northern Soul," which crawls out of the speakers as if to say, "Yeah, we've been gone since 1994 — but really, don't mind us!"
Snow Patrol | Fallen Empires
Word on the street had Snow Patrol looking to change up the big anthem sound for their sixth release.
O'Brother | Garden Window
O'Brother's bio for their debut album, Garden Window, reads in part: "Native American tradition believed taking a picture of someone also took a piece of their soul. O'Brother views this album in the same vein. It captures a piece of them at a time in their lives that they will never get back."
Guided by Voices | Let's Go Eat the Factory
The GBV name on Let's Go Eat the Factory' s label indicates two things to those fans: this is the first record to feature the "classic" Bee Thousand/Alien Lanes line-up since 1996, and this is the first Pollard album to deserve the GBV moniker since the break-up.
Brite Futures | Dark Past
A few years ago, the cutesy teens in Natalie Portman's Shaved Head slid out of Seattle on the hot pink shoulders of robo-bounce kinda-hit "Me + Ur Daughter" and the cheap intrigue of a ridiculous moniker.
A Place to Bury Strangers | Onwards to the Wall
Onwards to the Wall clocks in at 16 minutes and 35 seconds, and it could shatter into smithereens at any moment.
Cloud Nothings | Attack on Memory
With Attack on Memory , the third full-length from Cleveland-based Cloud Nothings, 20-year-old frontman Dylan Baldi approaches new, drastically darker material with the same empty-bottle angst that made his previous releases so appealing.
You Me at Six | Sinners Never Sleep
Sinners Never Sleep is a transitional album, though such efforts rarely bode as well for the future as this does.
Imperial Teen | Feel the Sound
Like its title, fifth album Feel the Sound is as generic as doubters have probably always assumed — they sound both relaxed and exhausted.
Air | Le Voyage Dans La Lune
It was inevitable that Air would one day be asked to soundtrack a colorized version of an iconic 1902 silent French film about moon exploration, right? There's the French thing, the moon thing, the kitsch-cool factor.
Less

Topics: CD Reviews , Music, review, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, More

| More

Most Popular

The Current Issue

Table of Contents

Cover Archive

Masthead | Authors | Contact us

Blogs

Where To Follow Me
Talking Politics | March 24, 2013 at 11:09 AM

Mo Takes His Turn
March 21, 2013 at 12:59 PM

[Q&A] KMFDM's Sascha Konietzko on art, Columbine and having balls
On The Download | March 18, 2013 at 3:22 PM

See this film series: The Belmont World Film Series @ Studio Cinema in Belmont
Outside The Frame | March 18, 2013 at 11:00 AM

See this film: This is Spinal Tap [with post-film talk by expert from Acoustical Society of America] @ the Coolidge
March 17, 2013 at 12:00 PM

ARTICLES BY ZETH LUNDY

BROWN BIRD | FITS OF REASON | March 18, 2013
Brown Bird, a boundary-pushing Americana duo from Rhode Island, make music that touches upon that can't-put-my-finger-on-it amalgamation of past and future sounds.

NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS | PUSH THE SKY AWAY | February 20, 2013
Much like the similarly low-key The Boatman's Call , Cave's highly anticipated 15th album with the Bad Seeds manages the puzzling feat of making a great band seem inconsequential, if not entirely absent.

SCOTT WALKER | BISH BOSCH | November 27, 2012
Scott Walker's late-period about-face is one of the strangest in the annals of pop music.

BILL WITHERS | THE COMPLETE SUSSEX AND COLUMBIA ALBUMS | October 31, 2012
Bill Withers has always been the down-to-earth, odd-man-out of the '70s soul brothers: he's the one who came bearing a lunch box on the cover of his relaxed 1971 debut, Just as I Am .

R.E.M. | DOCUMENT [25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION] | September 19, 2012
Fans of R.E.M. enjoy arguing over which album was the band's true shark-jump, but 1987's Document was inarguably the end of a groundbreaking era.