Well, here we are. After those few years away screaming and lurching their way priapically around the world as Grinderman, Nick Cave, Warren Ellis, Martyn Casey and Jim Sclavunos have hooked up with Thomas Wylder and Conway Savage for a new Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds album.
The record, called Push The Sky Away will be released on February 18th 2013, preceded by a single, the cheekily text speak ‘We No Who U R’ on December 3rd. About the new record, Nick Cave says, "Well, if I were to use that threadbare metaphor of albums being like children, then Push The Sky Away is the ghost-baby in the incubator and Warren’s loops are its tiny, trembling heartbeat. I don’t know, this record just seems new, you know, but new in an old school kind of way."
About the record we’re told (by the press release, not Mr Cave) that "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."
Intriguingly, the album was written in a notebook over the course of the year, and was shaped by Nick Cave’s wandering around google and Wikipedia entries, "whether they’re true or not" (Cave). The press release continues, "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."
Cave once again paid tribute to the power of the band around him in shaping the record. "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."
From what the informative we’ve been sent says, there’s a suggestion that this’ll neither be the raw blues rock we’ve come to expect from Grinderman, nor the piano-led album that perhaps many were expecting as a natural reaction to it. "On this album it’s not always apparent what instruments the band is playing: they may be traditional musical instruments but other sounds are clearly generated by objects unrelated to musical instruments. What’s being created is a collective musical language that’s rich and complex. Push The Sky Away 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."
Check out the trailer above for what sounds like arguably one of the most far-out Bad Seeds albums we’ve heard. "Is it one of those nasty ballads?" Cave asks at one point…
Tracklisting
‘We No Who U R’
‘Wide Lovely Eyes’
‘Water’s Edge’
‘Jubilee Street’
‘Mermaids’
‘We Real Cool’
‘Finishing Jubilee Street’
‘Higgs Boson Blues’
Push The Sky Away
