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Nick Cave (centre) and the Bad Seeds have dialed down their abrasion, but while Push the Sky Away is a quiet album, it isn?t a tranquil one.
Photograph by: Cat Stevens
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Push the Sky Away
Bad Seed Ltd.
4.5 stars out of 5
MONTREAL - When Nick Cave and company put the brakes on their feral Bad Seeds offshoot Grinderman just over a year ago, a reasonable theory for the sudden dissolution was that the bands? parallel lives would inevitably merge. Grinderman?s filth and fury had seeped into the Bad Seeds? raucous 2008 release Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, and with the departure of co-founder Mick Harvey, the latter group?s membership almost mirrored the former?s. But anyone expecting the Bad Seeds? 15th studio album to double as a third Grinderman disc will be reminded of one of Cave?s many gifts: the ability to shock.
The initial tremor came with the advance release of the narcotic opening track, We No Who U R, whose only violent element appeared to be the sharp swerve away from the prevailing abrasion of Cave?s recent work. Hearing it again in the context of the complete album, its calm veneer cracks apart to reveal a quiet promise of revenge. Push the Sky Away is subdued by the Bad Seeds? standards, but almost every song is tinted by shadows and populated by lost or damaged souls.
One could challenge a claim from Cave?s camp that this is ?the most subtly beautiful of all the Bad Seeds albums? ? The Boatman?s Call still exists ? but it?s certainly the most mysterious. As a lyricist, Cave is less concerned with virtuosic imagery this time than he is with capturing glimpses of the unknowable, reserving most of his ferocious wordplay for the hallucinatory Higgs Boson Blues. As a singer, he has dialed his commanding baritone down to a clenched croon. His band remains a fount of invention, with Warren Ellis meriting special mention for anchoring the tension with ominous loops and offering a release through otherworldly violin. Ellis and Cave?s stately soundtrack work (The Road, The Proposition, etc.) clearly influenced Push the Sky Away, whose slate-grey ambience also aligns with the surreal spiritual purgatory depicted in Cave?s savage 2009 novel The Death of Bunny Munro.
The soundtrack comparison relates to the album?s sequence as well as its tone. Wide Lovely Eyes ? almost a Celtic ballad beneath its gently scraping loop and aquatic texture ? provides an early moment of pure beauty before Water?s Edge introduces a turbulence that ripples through most of what follows. Its portrait of dangerous lust is of a piece with Jubilee Street, an unsettling narrative whose proportions of salvation and damnation shift with each listen, although the cathartic thrill of its stormy instrumental climax remains constant.
Just as unsettling is the postmodern Finishing Jubilee Street, which uses the namesake track?s creation as a springboard for a troubled dream, while junkyard percussion clatters against an eerily calm vocal refrain. Even the hypnotic title track tempers its serenity with haunted organ, closing the album on the perfect note of ambiguity.
Its low-key nature and compact running time notwithstanding, Push the Sky Away feels like a major work, even by the standards of an artist who hasn?t released many minor works. Its ghostly atmosphere has no direct precedent in the Bad Seeds catalogue, and follows a period when Cave?s raw power was at a peak. His next move has never been less predictable than it is now; after more than 30 years of magnificent brutality, tenderness, torment and redemption, that?s truly something to celebrate.
Podworthy: Wide Lovely Eyes
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds perform March 22 at Metropolis, 59 Ste. Catherine St. E. The show is sold out.
Push the Sky Away is released on Tuesday, Feb. 19. A complete stream of the album can be found here.
jzivitz@montrealgazette.com
? Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette
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