Watching the evolution of Nick Cave is a bit like watching the evolution of man.
When Cave first grew arms and legs and shambled, quadrupedal, out from the primordial sea, he resembled some sort of prehistoric ’70s post-punk subhuman. Most people’s first exposure to him was through the apocalyptic video for The Birthday Party’s “Nick the Stripper,” which saw Nick romping through a flaming circus with “hell” scrawled in big bloody letters across his emaciated chest, howling like a madman over cawing brass fanfares.
Since then he’s grown, scaled up the proverbial evolutionary ladder one wrung at a time at a snail’s pace. After ditching The Birthday Party he quickly rebounded and formed Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds with a mostly new backing of knuckle-draggers. This first incarnation of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds released a cadre of wickedly gothy post-punk masterpieces starting with 1986’s Your Funeral... My Trial and culminating with 1996’s Murder Ballads (People might cite Let Love In as the peak, but those people are false prophets.). They were raucous and they were mean and they were the best at what they did.
1997 saw the birth of a new Cave, withered and defeated and distinctly human, confined to a Hamlet-black suit and sucking down cigarettes on a lonely piano bench. The Boatman’s Call was his breakup album, and it was wonderfully, pathetically understated. Afterward Cave found his renaissance with gospel-tinged alternative rock and later garage-rock thrash, but the piano man in him has always simmered just below the surface, and now, 16 years later, he’s finally discreetly exploded forth again.
Push the Sky Away marks the Bad Seeds’ return to deviation from form with Nick and Company dialing the volume way back down from 11 to -10. Maybe it’s because Cave’s gallbladder has been squeezed dry of bile through side project Grinderman’s masochistic and hypersexual churn. Or maybe it’s because final founding Bad Seed Mick Harvey abdicated recently, but the Bad Seeds’ 15th album is a restrained and ghostly affair. And maybe it’s because of the maximalist Americanism of 2008’s Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! but Push the Sky Away is predominantly a shrunken Nick and Warren Ellis (no, not that Warren Ellis, the other one) coeffort, all keys, rattling percussion, sickly vocals and violin accentuations.
It feels like a more sinister take on The Boatman’s Call’s wide-eyed sincerity, in this sense—but where once there was heartbreak, now there’s something considerably darker. Something comparable to Eminem’s “3 A.M.” murder blues, the kind you get when you’re shaking and caffeine-addled and confused, waist deep in a pool of blood.
The two advance singles, “We No Who U R” and “Jubilee Street,” represent the two absolute ends of the record’s spectrum. The former is a spectral thing, paper thin and presided over by patient drum loops and a clinking piano and some of Cave’s most modest and detached lyrical content to date. Nursery rhyme confidentials like “The tree don’t care what the little bird sings/We go down with the dew in the morning light” dominate the first half of the song, and it’s downright pleasant. Innocent, even.
With the back half, however, menace creeps in in the form of a muted air raid siren synth hissing in the background, and the repeated chant of “We know who you are/and we know where you live/and we know there’s no need to forgive” sounds equal part reassurance and blood-curdling threat.
“Jubilee Street,” meanwhile, is the diametric opposite. It finds Cave back in his old storyteller’s boots, ever the psychosexual wreck of a man, recounting the murder of prostitute Bee over slow percussion thumps and plucked guitar lines. The grizzly content is easy to brush over on first listen, though—the song’s chorus, “All those good people out on Jubilee Street/They oughta practice what they preach,” and the mounting violin crescendos courtesy of Ellis give the song a moralistic and heroic vibe.
By the end of the song, as Cave is wailing, “I’m transforming/I’m vibrating/I’m glowing/I’m flying, look at me now,” it’s virtually impossible to remember that he’s the monster of the story, the putrid Nabokovian man who’s strutting around a “fetus on a leash.”
And that’s key to Cave’s eternal appeal. He’s our greatest living songwriter for a reason. Even here on Push the Sky Away, stripped of all his growl and all his bite, he’s still able to wrap you around his finger and twist you in ways music should never be able to. “Higgs Boson Blues” is an eight minute “On the Beach”-esque track about the weariness of universal understanding and Hannah Montana. Slow-grind “We Real Cool,” like “We No Who U R,” utilizes Generation Y SMS wordsmithery and at one point, desperately and entirely unironically, claims “Wikipedia is heaven” (which, if you think about it, is considerably truer than one might first think). “Mermaids” finds Nick crooning, “I believe in God/I believe in Mermaids, too,” and “Finishing Jubilee Street” is a sparse meta-tale about poetic-license-Nick Cave’s pedophilic nightmares immediately after completing “Jubilee Street.”
The album closes with the title track, possibly the most minimalistic song the band has ever penned, a slow organ drone overlaying the distant thunder of occasional bass beats. Sounding more tired than he ever has, the 55-year-old Nick Cave whispers “And some people say it’s just rock’n roll/Oh, but it gets you right down to your soul.” It’s the least rock thing he’s ever written, but the message resonates and in context even its nauseating cliché feels like tongues of flame lapping against your brain.
Much like musician Scott Walker, who I raved about to closed ears and minds last year, Cave remains one of our greatest uncelebrated treasures. He’s aged better than Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young and every other heralded artist from the last half century; he’s the wiry shadow to their 10 foot tall frames. And if it isn’t really possible to make a perfect, zeitgeist album in 2013 anymore (the internet has robbed us all of a cultural narrative, but that’s a discussion for another day) then Push the Sky Away finds Cave doing the second best thing; making one of the best albums by one of if not the absolute greatest songwriter who has ever lived.
Rating: A+
