Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds– Push The Sky Away (Bad Seed Ltd.)
Those artists who have defied probability and stuck around for a few decades, especially those who were able to carve out a recognizable identity, are faced with a perilous and potentially calamitous decision with each new creation they cast out into the world. They could take the route favored by the AC/DCs of the world and simply give the people what it is presumed they want – a largely unadulterated version of what's been peddled for decades. Or they could chance a detour or two, finding a route that could be more gratifying, but might leave large swaths of the audience thinking they should've zigged instead of zagged. But there's a third way, the one Nick Cave has utilized. His career can be seen as a series of distinct eras, each characterized by an aesthetic that's constant and immediately identifiable but at the same time distinct from the one that preceded it. The feral post-punk of the Birthday Party that first brought him acclaim bore only passing resemblance to the sinister and bombastic gloom of the subsequent decade and a half, which in turn was almost wholly dissimilar from the Leonard Cohen-esque piano balladry of the albums he released post-Murder Ballads. The past several years have witnessed Cave again reaching out towards previously unexplored territories, whether it was the bawdy, blustery Stooges-style aggression of Grinderman (an approach clearly reflected in the last Bad Seeds album, 2008's Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!) or the hushed instrumentals present on the soundtrack work he's created with long-time cohort Warren Ellis. It can be difficult to tell if his newest, Push The Sky Away, is an attempt to forge new material out of elements present on his recent explorations or if it's an attempt at a cleaner break from which something new can be forged, but the result is an equally rewarding and frustrating album that, for better and worse, is distinct from anytheing else he's done yet.
The sparse, ruminative tone that characterizes Push The Sky Away is apparent from the album's first notes, presenting the listener with a tense melancholy, a sense of anxious menace not dissimilar from the sort that's undercut most of Cave's work, but in this case simultaneously more subdued and subtle than his early work and less apt to fall into the sentimentality of his more recent, softer material. The songs sound more reliant on spontaneity than structure, as sparse suggestions of rhythm and meandering melodic elements unfold atop each other, with successive waves of sounds denoting verses and choruses as much as any distinct chord progressions. This brings to the material a sense of receding and expanding minimalism that's unparallelled on any of his other albums. The use of layered loops displays the songs' passing affinities with the quieter moments of the Grinderman albums, but while Push The Sky Away shares with them a certain raw looseness, there isn't much in the way of further musical connection. Though if the songs are not at first considered from the foreground of attention, the minimalism can be off-putting for a listener expecting more conventional songwriting (as much as anything Nick Cave has ever done could be called “conventional”), the hushed hypnotic qualities help to reinforce how compelling the material can be.
Lyrically, Cave claims that the album's lyrics were largely inspired by getting lost in Wikipedia rabbit-holes and reflecting on the way that the internet has affected humanity's ability to gauge the value and validity of events and individuals. While commentary regarding the ubiquity of technology and its effects on people isn't exactly a stretch (might as well write a concept album about water being wet or fire being hot), Cave's ability to extract some fruitful lyrical conceits from well-trod ground is to his credit, though his inability to do it with any sort of consistency provides the album's most glaring flaws. The spirit of instant information, narcissism, and gullibility (and the manifold intersections thereof) pervades the album, from the text-message shorthand of “We No Who U R” (an exception to the rule that Prince is the only person who should be allowed to substitute letters for full words) to the seemingly arbitrary collection of mystical figures and self-improvement methodology in “Mermaids.” When this is executed well (and the qualifier cannot be emphasized enough), the lyrics represent quite a departure from Cave's normal narrative style, favoring an ambling, stream of consciousness approach that is able to incorporate hints of nightmarish menace without coming off as heavy-handed or contrived.
Some of the problem, however, lies with the extent to which a great deal of these reflections are based on sources that are not only hyper-specific but so inexorably tied to a very recent time and place that they seem plucked out of Huffington Post headlines. These references include, but are not limited to Wikipedia, the Higgs Boson particle, and Miley Cyrus television shows. “Hannah Montana does the African savanna” might be the worst/weirdest couplet he's ever written – incidentally, the verse in which it's found is one of the only parts of the album with the lyrics left unprinted. Make of that what you will. It's not difficult to see that he's attempting to use these allusions in service of his larger commentary, but Cave has time and again proven himself to be at his best when he's working with more abstruse imagery, the severed connection to any specific timeliness lending the lyrics their distinct timeless quality.
While these references could be taken as part of a larger theme (if clumsily executed), some other lyrics are jarring to the point of being distracting. The start of “Finishing Jubilee Street” begins with Cave detailing his own writing of another of the album's songs, a self-referential element that seems somewhat unnecessary. Perhaps it's a songwriting experiment, perhaps a means of tying the song in with the Information Age self-obsession on which so much of the album comments, but either way it comes off as a forced insertion in what's otherwise one of the more interesting songs present. Also strange are the lyrics to “Mermaids,” which would have been one of the most conventionally pretty moments on the album if not for lyrics that juxtapose the sort of bluntly vulgar wording that Cave has utilized to great effect in his more raucous music with references to the titular mythic creatures that are frankly rather confusing. The music eases along with a sad gravity, but the lyrics about being “the match that would fire up her snatch” or taking a “mermaid awareness course” (whatever that is) are baffling and do a good job of undermining much of the power the song might otherwise have possessed.
This is hardly to suggest all the lyrical content falls flat. Though some of his intimations of sexuality come off as brusque, songs like “Water's Edge” and “Jubilee Street” are able to reference the lives of sex workers (the former somewhat obliquely, the latter considerably more directly) utilizing fractured and darkly surreal narratives, rife with lines like “these days I go downtown in my tie and tails / I've got a fetus on a leash” or “they take apart their bodies like toys for the local boys,” which are harsh and visceral but still retain a suggestive quality that sidesteps direct literalism. Even the album cover itself – featuring Cave standing in a white room, holding open a window as a nude woman tiptoes past, head in hands and hair covering her face – reflects this quality, as familiar images and actions are set slightly askew, not so much that their familiarity is obscured but enough that there is a lingering feeling of something off or even slightly damaged.
With every song, Push The Sky Away proves to be an album of challenges. It seems that Nick Cave was attempting to push himself into territory distinct from his previous work, a reinvention he's successfully navigated several times before. The facets of the album that work often take several listens to acclimate to, and there are still elements that the album would have done well without, but these conflicting qualitative judgments make for a complex listen. While far from perfect, much of the greatness of which Cave is capable is still present and accounted for. Hopefully the direction towards which he seems to have taken tentative steps can lead to a more soundly realized vision of this album's unmoored, fragmented potential, ideally helping him push his work towards something that can both satisfy his need for reinvention and live up to the standard of his best albums.