Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
Push The Sky Away

You spend a lifetime searching for something that leaves an emptiness inside. And there's a moment when this thing appears before you, and you didn't even expect to find it. Sometimes it's a person who wipes away all your emotions, sometimes it's a record. It's not said that things shouldn't coincide. Like cosmic alignments at the funeral of your best friend.

I tried to open the white lacquered coffin, and I saw something: the dim light of a room with a man well-dressed in black at its center, gaunt, worn thin by the years, and that man showed me a window. And so I decided to look out, and I saw a story through the gaze of a heroin addict looking beyond the dirty glass and seeing himself again. He sees himself living. And he starts to recount what he sees around his figure. He does not speak of himself; he describes everything else, what he passes by, alongside that exhausted individual. Just bones and too much life covering them.

This is how Nick Cave presents himself today: naked, thirsty for words, without being a specter but without breathing, without having lost all that life covering the bones but worn out by the narrative. And so is his music, his and no one else's. Music that comes from the dust of the bones of a myriad of crazed creatures - And he, a skeleton among ghosts, rises and scatters once more his bad seeds over a field covered in frost. Some of them irretrievably lost long ago, fallen in other fields and sprouted into magnificent fruits (Blixa Bargeld, Hugo Race), others terribly close yet so horrendously far (Mick Harvey), others still held firm in his fist ready to be sown once again (Warren Ellis). Nick Cave is the only one who can make epicness bloom from work as barren as the desert, the only one who can sit on a worn-out stool and speak to the people's hearts without seeming like a stupid Dylan-esque parody of himself. Being reborn through the haze, he births "Push The Sky Away". And he devours his touching soul with gusts of electric chill over organ music that dances on synthetic percussion, assuring that there's nothing to forgive ("We No Who U R"), dresses up as a black angel and sharpens rusty guitars, asks the dust, crosses a desert haunted by the ghosts of folk ("Wide Lovely Eyes"), is devoured by the urgency to vomit words upon words, warns "ye you grow old and you grow cold" with his ferocity in suit and tie while the bass hits the joints ("Water's Edge"), and finally the transformation of the feeble into the epic through voice and strings and arpeggios cloaked in mist ("Jubilee Street") and finally he plunges into a sea/evil of funereal drones, synthesized specters, and tells again, doesn't stop, only to leave the spirits space to penetrate those bones tormented by existence.

And that's how Nick Cave has pushed the sky away.