180gm Heavyweight Vinyl with album download code.
At the heart of ‘Push the Sky Away’ is a naturalism and warmth that makes it the most subtly beautiful of all the Bad Seeds albums. The contemporary settings of myths, and the cultural references that have time-stamped Nick’s songs of the twenty-first century mist lightly through details drawn from the life he observed around his seaside home, through the tall windows on the album’s mysterious and ambiguous cover.
The songs on this album took form in a modest notebook with shellac covers over the course of almost a year. The notebook is a treasured analogue artefact but the internet is equally important to Nick: Googling curiosities, being entranced by exotic Wikipedia entries “whether they’re true or not”. These songs convey how on the internet profoundly significant events, momentary fads and mystically-tinged absurdities sit side-by-side and question how we might recognise and assign weight to what’s genuinely important.
‘Push the Sky Away’ was produced by Nick Launay and recorded at La Fabrique, a recording studio based in a 19th Century mansion in the South of France, where the walls of the main studio are lined with an immense collection of classical vinyl. The album has a clarity and sweet strangeness that’s built upon the refusal to accept limitations, whether they be the traditional uses and sounds of musical instruments, lyric styles, or diminished spiritual horizons.
Some good news for fans of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds… the motley crew of rugged old dudes are set to release a new album in February 2013. According to Clashmusic.com, the Australian artist and his long-term band of cohorts will release an album entitled Push The Sky Away on February 15, 2012.
The last time Nick Cave released an album with The Bad Seeds was in 2008, when they came out with the seminal Dig, Lazarus, Dig! In the meantime, Cave has been working with his other band, Grinderman, who have been regulars on the festival circuit for the last couple of summers and he’s also had his hand in a number of soundtrack projects, including The Death of Bunny Munro and The Road. Nick seemed to delight in explaining how the creative process worked for the band, this time around, in a recent interview, saying “I enter the studio with a handful of ideas, unformed and pupal; it's the Bad Seeds that transform them into things of wonder. Ask anyone who has seen them at work. They are unlike any other band on earth for pure, instinctive inventiveness.”
The Bad Seeds have always been the band to whom Cave has returned, since his
early band The Birthday Party disbanded. With the current line up of Warren
Ellis, Jim Sclavunos, Thomas Wylder, Martyn P Casey and Conway Savage, you can
expect that Push the Sky Away will be yet another masterpiece in Nick
Cave’s enviable canon of work.
(Contact Music)