This, in turn, led to the more garage rock-focused Bad Seeds album Dig, Lazarus Dig!!! which, despite the big shift from the sound of The Lyre of Orpheus – you can hear the beginnings of this move to a rockier sound in Abattoir Blues – was critically acclaimed. Push The Sky Away can be best described as a shift back to their old ways. It is also the first album without Mick Harvey, who was fed up of the band playing ‘stupid rock songs’; it is arguably this which was the influence behind this shift to the more melodic intricacies The Bad Seeds are most known for.
As always, the stars of the show here are the lyrics. Drenched with pathos, Cave tackles the usual topics of love, death, religion and life itself. Nowhere else can you hear an album that will reference both legendary blues guitarist Robert Johnson and Miley Cyrus. Cave leads you through these stories with some extremely intricate imagery particularly with lyrics such as “I was the match that would fire up her snatch”, something that he has always done so well. It seems like Cave sees no point in just singing about such topics without making you picture those topics in action.
The melodies themselves are always bubbling away in the background. From the rumbling bass of ‘We Real Cool’ to the repetitive finger picking in ‘Finishing Jubilee Street’, it lets Nick Cave’s vocals ride to the forefront. Still, the strings and brass do fight to find the light, bursting through intermittently, only really coming to the forefront in an explosive way such as at the end of ‘Jubilee Street’. This continuous struggle adds even more depth to the tension in the lyrics themselves; brooding in the background menacingly or exploding with an exciting beauty to hint at some hope or joy.
Push The Sky Away is odd and much subtler than anything that has come before it, but this subtlety does not remove its ferocity. Cave wears his influences on his sleeve, with ‘Higgs Boson Blues’ feeling like a lost Allen Ginsberg poem. It’s by no means the easiest Bad Seeds album to get into but when the subtle melodies click alongside the interesting lyrics, it works much better, becoming almost cinematic – unsurprising considering Nick Cave’s recent foray into the film world. It’s worth the effort but it does take some time to really hook onto it. As with most of their albums, however, you’ll probably need to listen to some Deee-Lite afterwards to cheer yourself up.
4/5
Recommended download: ‘We No Who ‘U ‘R’
