My last album was called “Eye in
the Sky” and the title track was about an invasive nosey, mind-reading eye in
the sky. So it is very fitting that this next album tells you just what you
should do when the sky gets too up in your business.
Disc 765 is….Push the Sky Away
Artist: Nick Cave
& the Bad Seeds
Year of Release: 2012
What’s up with the Cover? Nick Cave imperiously gestures
for a hot naked girl to get out…er…or in. It is hard to tell. This is either a
very troubling moment, or a very sexy one.
How I Came To Know It: I’m a Nick Cave fan. He put out a
new album, so I bought it.
How It Stacks Up: I recently bought two more Nick
Cave albums that I checked out online and liked (“Let Love In” and “The Good
Son”). That means I now have ten. I don’t know my two new ones very well, but
I’ll assume for now that “Push the Sky Away” is better than one and not as good
as the other. I’ll put the new album in at 8 out of 10, bumping
“Nocturama” (reviewed back at Disc 370) and one of the aforementioned
records behind it.
Ratings: 3 stars
Five years after releasing the up-tempo and frenetic
“Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!” Nick Cave returns with “Push the Sky Away,” an
album with a quiet and moody quality that is Cave’s flip side.
“Push the Sky Away” is a slow burner of a record. The
songs are languorous and laid back, taking their time slouching along on their
way to be born. Cave’s vocal is subdued and devoid of the snarl he sometimes
takes on when he’s got his groove on.
The whole record has a soothing flow that makes it
feel like you are listening to it underwater, and it is fitting that so many of
the songs have water imagery. Mermaids feature on both the song of the same
name and more creepily on “Wide Lovely
Eyes” where they are hung from the streetlights by their hair.
The setting for the sexually charged “Water’s Edge” is the beach. It serves as
both the backdrop to the action and also an image of the edge of discovery as
the girls from the capital and the local boys come together in the ancient mystic
right of getting it on. Cave takes great delight in crossing the line of the
spiritual and the sexual:
“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
Capital
Who shriek at the edge of the
water
Shriek to speak, to reach for the
speech and the speech to be heard.”
Legs or not, these are mermaids, but not the kind
you’ll find in a Disney movie, or keening away at a young Tom Hanks. This is a
tale of raw desire, the dark side of any good myth. Like any good myth it
dwells at the borderland between reality and fantasy; living on the beach
between our conscious and subconscious minds.
This album is full of sexy music for the
literary-minded, most of it building slow and inexorable to its lascivious and
scandalous climax. Consider the opening to “Mermaids”
which feels like what J. Alfred Prufrock would sing about if he were an even
dirtier old man than T.S. Eliot dared to make him:
“She was a catch
And we were a match
I was the match
That would fire up her snatch
But there was a catch
I was no match
And I was fired from her crotch
Now I sit and watch
The mermaids sun themselves on
the rocks
They are beyond our touch I watch
Them wave at me
They wave and slip
Back into the sea.”
The record lacks some dynamics and the songs are so
subtle that minus headphones a lot of what makes “Push the Sky Away” great
would be missed. There isn’t anything truly bad on it, even though it isn’t
Cave at his best either melodically or lyrically.
When given your careful attention, this record works
its wicked magic. It echoes through your head long after it is over, leaving
you calm and alert like after meditating and maybe a little excited. I think
that is what Nick Cave is going for, and he achieves it admirably.
Best
tracks: Wide
Lovely Eyes, Water’s Edge, Mermaids, Push the Sky Away
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