Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Album: Push the Sky Away
Label: Mute
Tracks: 12
Website: http://www.nickcave.com

Having lived with the 15th Bad Seeds album for a couple of months I'm still not sure there's a great deal more to say about it than there was after the first few listens. Cave remains an eloquent, arresting, compelling commentator, chronicling the tatty edges of the human condition as richly as its foul underbelly and craggy face, but he's getting on a bit now (he's 55) and things are different.

It seems to irk him that where once he would have been down and dirty with the deed-doers, fully immersed in their horrors, gorging on their mixed mores and revelling in rousing the ire of the mainstream, he must now observe the parade of depravity from the sidelines, commenting on its progression, noting its subtle changes, bringing his experience to bear, but not actually taking part. Not that Push the Sky Away is the sound of a grumpy old man, uncomfortable in his own skin, but it does suggest that its stories are more likely to be the author's interpretation of what he has seen before him rather than an account born of participation.

Interestingly, where some of his contemporaries might elect to rage against the dying of the light, Cave chronicles his acceptance of the passing of time, easing into his dotage with a refined resistance on the album's title (and closing) track.

Unlike the two most recent Bad Seeds albums (Abbatoir Blues/Song of Orpheus and Dig, Lazarus, Dog!!!), Pushing the Sky Away doesn't come with a great big central pop song. There's no Nature Boy or More News From Nowhere that's ripe for casual appreciation, but there is plenty of subtlety, stacks of menace and a gob-full of lyrical barbs.

Higgs Boson Blues and the sparsely orchestrated We Real Cool are breathtakingly restrained, Mermaids imagines the naughty bits of watery bints, Wide Lovely Eyes sounds like the end of the season (a menopausal metaphor perhaps) and Finishing Jubilee Street is consummate Cave storytelling, like the album laced with contemporary detail and not much of it pretty.

Nick Churchill
www.thegranvillechambers.co.uk