Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Push the Sky Away - released Feb 2013 (Bad Seed Ltd.)

Genres: Post-Punk, Singer-Songwriter, Alternative Rock

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds Push the Sky Away is a decent effort and well worth the listener's time. This is not to say that the album is their best as it offers a stark change of pace to their last more wild and more varied album Dig Lazarus Dig !!! from 2008.

The songs of Push the Sky Away are all very languid and subdued, almost to a fault. They sound like one very long song. Towards the middle of selection I found it hard to distinguish songs like 'Mermaids' and 'We Real Cool' at all. The music was too lulling to be interesting at these moments. The best moments are bookends - The starting four songs 'We No Who U R', 'Wide Lovely Eyes', Water's Edge' and 'Jubillee Street' are all memorable and great. They use the limited selection of instruments and tones to provide a lot of focus on the interplay of the words and music. The Last two songs 'Higgs Boson Blues' and 'Push the Sky Away' are worthy of the Bad Seeds best material.  

The problem lies in the fact that these don't really feel like fully fleshed out Bad Seeds songs, in the tradition that the Bad Seeds through their many lineup changes have pursued. They sound like Nick Cave and Warren Ellis songs. This isn't a completely bad thing, Warren Ellis has been along on some of Cave's best projects such as Grinderman and some superb soundtrack work - it's just it works in a different way than what you'd expect. The creators of the music may have structured it this way and on that level it works. Possibly this is because this record was released by Bad Seeds Ltd. Cave was allowed more creative control and this is the type of music he has wanted to release for a while. 

All in all, the album is rewarding but definitely of its kind - 3.5/5 stars 

Here is a link to the Bad Seeds offical youtube page so you may listen to Push the Sky Away album yourself.

Below is a player for the lead single 'We No Who U R'. Check it out.