Push the Sky Away
- Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
- Band Name: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
- Record Label: Bad Seeds Ltd.
- Release Date: Feb 19, 2013
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Feb 19, 201370The sonic sea change is deliberate, but given what a vastly musical band the Bad Seeds have always been, this more economical approach is jarring and delightfully unsettling.
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Feb 19, 201370It’s a pretty-sounding ugly LP, one that contains its fair share of ghosts, standing in for the sadness and brutality of our time, perhaps even the sadness and brutality of human existence.
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Feb 15, 201380For all the album's wandering spirit, the first eight tracks on Push the Sky Away are neatly structured into two complementary, four-song halves that mirror one another.
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Feb 11, 201360Words are what sustain Push The Sky Away. [Mar 2013, p.97]
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Feb 11, 201390There's something deeply satisfying about the way the songs fit together as an album, their sequence strengthened both by the homogenous tone of the music with its air of wistful melancholy, and by the way each song seems to push the next one forward. [Mar 2013, p.61]
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Feb 11, 201380What you may lose in rock'n'roll kicks you gain in poignancy and poetry. [Mar 2013, p.86]
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Feb 19, 201360The first Seeds LP without co-founder Mick Harvey, Sky is full of tiny sounds--plinking guitars, pulsing bass, lazy subtle drums.
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Feb 19, 201367Push They Sky Away’s oppressively hollow minimalism is both its biggest drawback and its greatest strength.
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Feb 19, 201380Even in a career filled with expansive balladry, there are moments on Push the Sky Away as lovely as anything in his repertoire, from the music-box piano chimes of "We No Who U R" to the "Dress Rehearsal Rag"-strings on "We Real Cool" and the dulcet choruses of "Finishing Jubilee Street" and "Wide Lovely Eyes."
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Feb 19, 201390A masterpiece that merges the experimentation and freedom of their side projects with Cave’s most tender songcraft.
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Feb 15, 201380While nearly unshakeable in its bleakness, Push the Sky Away is another exemplary effort from the Bad Seeds, and the moodiest entry into the Nick Cave canon in over a decade.
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Feb 20, 2013100The peak of Cave's 15th album with the Bad Seeds is a multidimensional walkabout through sonic shadows and fog. [22 Feb 2013, p.74]
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Feb 15, 201370Push the Sky Away, then, is not the Bad Seeds at their zenith, but pretty bloody spectacular for a fifteenth (or seventeenth, or twentieth) album.
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Feb 11, 201380Push The Sky Away demonstrates that even in his 30th year, nobody delivers a lyric quite like Nick Cave.
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Feb 14, 201380There aren't the guitar storms of a Mercy Seat or Do You Love Me? but Jubilee Street--a beguiling tale of brothels and hypocrisy--could quietly become another Seeds classic.
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Feb 14, 201390Even with all of this depth, Push The Sky Away finds Cave doing more with less lyrically.
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Feb 15, 201370Push the Sky Away’s rewards are interspersed among plenty of frustrating moments, yet even at its worst, it’s a fascinating album.
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Feb 19, 201390In Push the Sky Away, an album of thrilling darkness pierced by moments of brilliant light, Cave may have crafted his defining statement.
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Feb 14, 201380Sky’s post-post-punk mellowing proves a welcome development, revealing maturity instead of postured snarling.
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Feb 19, 201384The album surprises continually, offering humor, crises and redemption within the sound of something as lovely and enticing as it is aggressive and challenging.
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Feb 11, 201390An LP as weighty, compelling and brilliant as The Bad Seeds have ever produced.
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Mar 14, 201388While it’s likely that Push the Sky Away will not cause the seas to part before him, it will surely ephemerally deliver us from this evil wasteland of vacant contemporary culture and mutilated morality.
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Feb 19, 201390Richly arranged, masterfully sequenced, and full of brooding, Push the Sky Away combines the stately beauty of The Boatman’s Call and No More Shall We Part with the intensity of Grinderman/Lazarus-era Cave while managing to sound like neither.
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Feb 27, 201380We know better than to call Push The Sky Away Nick Cave’s best album, but if you want a portrait of the artist, as an artist, the album qualifies as “essential” even by the strictest definition.
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Feb 19, 201380Sometimes his baritone carries lyrics that are blunt and tart, and others opaque and blurry, but never lacking bite.
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Mar 13, 201367It all adds up to a challenging song cycle.
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Mar 15, 201370Though at times exquisite, the slow-burn even instrumental keel is, ironically, the most jarring aspect of Push The Sky Away. [No. 96, p.52]
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Feb 19, 201375Those with a patient appreciation for Cave's dramatic sense, and the ways in which his singular musical voice has evolved over years, will find much to focus on within.
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Feb 20, 201363Push the Sky Away feels heavy on breath-taking and woodshedding, an album of waiting for sparks to ignite.
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Feb 28, 201380In spite of daft moments, the chilly shimmer of Push The Sky Away works its magic. [Feb 2013, p.45]
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Mar 1, 201378Push the Sky Away has the ability to move without raising its voice above a whisper.
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Feb 14, 201390Potent in its masculine restraint, this record has surely always existed, just waiting to be plucked from the surf; a mercurial, magisterial, stick of seaside rock.
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Feb 25, 201390The lift-off and liberation come subtly, bearing the masterful marks of men who've learned the value of compositional patience (it's no coincidence that Cave and Ellis have also forged a successful partnership as film scorers). This, ultimately, makes the emotional devastation you experience once the record has spun all the more remarkable.
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Feb 27, 201370It's a sweet musical reprieve from radio presenters with beaming suicide smiles gracing subway posters with snappy catchphrases.
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Feb 19, 201380PTSA may never stare you in the face, but you'd be a fool to turn your back on it. It's carrying a knife.
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Feb 15, 2013100These are big themes, dealt with imaginatively by a singer and a band both operating at the peak of their powers. Album of the year?
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Feb 22, 201390The absurdity and terror that Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds have so often courted aren’t absent on Push The Sky Away. They’re just muted, and rendered all the more seductive via lush arrangements and Cave’s crooning baritone.
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Feb 13, 201370There are some wonderful moments, the single ('We No Who U R') and the title track are starkly magnificent, but the general feel is a bit of a comedown.
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Feb 11, 201390Cave is always the first to give fulsome credit to his band, and they aim true here in the most explorative, coherent and well-realised Bad Seeds album in years.
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Feb 19, 201380This is a very good record indeed, just not the record the more hidebound Cave lifer would instantly press to their breast.
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Feb 15, 201380Freighted deep with lugubrious rolls of oily bass, sandy inhalations of desert strings, holy intonations and salty lust, Push the Sky Away is the audio equivalent of bathing in the Dead Sea.
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Feb 19, 201375Lovely strings, flute and backing vocals occasionally shed some light, but mostly this is Cave playing it slow, hushed and haunted.
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Feb 26, 201380It might be their fifteenth album in a 30-year career, but Push The Sky Away proves beyond all doubt--even mine--that the group is still at the top of their game.
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Feb 13, 201395Experimental yet built on superb songwriting, fresh and surprising but still somehow recognisably a Bad Seeds record, the amount of innovation and inspiration found on Push The Sky Away proves that Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds must still care an awful lot about this rock ‘n’ roll stuff.