Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Push the sky away

"Push The Sky Away" is perhaps the Bad Seeds' most extraordinary album. The long-player radiates naturalness and warmth, a work of subtle beauty.

The songs took shape over a year in Nick Cave's beloved notebook. The notebook is an analog artifact, but the internet is just as essential to Nick Cave. He researches curiosities via Google, is fascinated by exotic Wikipedia entries, "regardless of whether they're true or not." How the World Wide Web reveals world-changing events, fleeting the new songs tell us that fads and mythically colored absurdities stand side by side, and they raise the question of how we can recognize and judge what is really important.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds recorded "Push The Sky Away" in the South of France with producer Nick Lanay in a 19th-century mansion, the home of the La Fabrique studio, whose main hall is decorated with a huge collection of records.

Nick Cave founded the Bad Seeds in 1982 after the breakup of his band The Birthday Party. In 1984, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds released their debut album, "From Her to Eternity." Since then, the band has recorded 14 more studio albums, and their output remains as unpredictable and vibrant as those early, groundbreaking recordings from Hansa Studios in Berlin. Numerous artists have referenced Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds; icons such as Johnny Cash, Metallica, and The Arctic Monkeys have covered their songs.

Product Information
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds release their fifteenth studio album

Well, if I were to use that threadbare metaphor of albums being like children, then Push The Sky Away is the ghost-baby in the incubator and Warren's loops are its tiny, trembling heart-beat. - Nick Cave

At the heart of Push the Sky Away is a naturalism and warmth that makes it the most subtly beautiful of all the Bad Seeds albums. The contemporary settings of myths, and the cultural references that have time-stamped Nick's songs of the twenty-first century mist lightly through details drawn from the life he observed around his seaside home, through the tall windows on the album?s mysterious and ambiguous cover.

The songs on this album took form in a modest notebook with shellac covers over the course of almost a year. The notebook is a treasured analogue artefact but the internet is equally important to Nick: Googling curiosities, being entranced by exotic Wikipedia entries ?whether they're true or not?. These songs convey how on the internet profoundly significant events, momentary fads and mystically-tinged absurdities sit side-by-side and question how we might recognise and assign weight to what's genuinely important.

Push the Sky Away was produced by Nick Launay and recorded at La Fabrique, a recording studio based in a 19th Century mansion in the South of France, where the walls of the main studio are lined with an immense collection of classical vinyl.

?I enter the studio with a handful of ideas, unformed and pupal; it's the Bad Seeds that transform them into things of wonder. Ask anyone who has seen them at work. They are unlike any other band on earth for pure, instinctive inventiveness. - Nick Cave

On this album it-s not always apparent what instruments the band is playing: they may be traditional musical instruments but other sounds are clearly generated by objects unrelated to musical instruments. What's being created is a collective musical language that?s rich and complex.

Push the Sky Away has a clarity and sweet strangeness that's built upon the refusal to accept limitations, whether they be the traditional uses and sounds of musical instruments, lyric styles, or diminished spiritual horizons.

I don't know, this record just seems new, you know, but new in an old school kind of way. - Nick Cave

(nickcave. com)

Reviews
"A quiet, almost meditative album full of string candy, gently plucked guitars, and a slightly rumbling bass, which develops a hypnotic pull through Cave's mesmerizing spoken word." (stereoplay, March 2013)

Tracklisting
A1    We No Who U R    
A2    Wide Lovely Eyes    
A3    Water's Edge    
A4    Jubilee Street    
A5    Mermaids    

B1    We Real Cool    
B2    Finishing Jubilee Street    
B3    Higgs Boson Blues    
B4    Push The Sky Away