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Who are these shadow-shadow men, these aged male characters with an overbearing sense of Nabokov’s precious butterflies, engaging in lurid acts, over-glorifying their outlets, expressing their instinctual libido on Freudian sexual development malpractice terms? What narrative value is still left in analyzing the horrible man, painting his noble savage portrait of the “hooker with the heart of gold,” finding freedom in the oppression of another? Lolita is hardly a portrait of the child Dolores, more so a romanticizing self-portrait of the man Humbert Humbert.
Nick Cave’s Jubilee Street is less about “Jubilee Street” or “B,” and more about the same absent character who should “practice what I preach” and has “a fetus on a leash.” This idea/portrait is extended into the meta-scope of “Finishing Jubilee Street,” where the “writer” of “Jubilee Street” (impossibly Nick Cave as whoever Nick Cave is; he’s too smart and practiced to work without poetic license) confronts the effects of this kind of character obsession, falling into a fever dream of sexual anxiety for losing a young-girl bride named Mary Stanford. It’s an almost too perfect analysis, “Last Night your shadow scampered up the wall/ It flies/ And leaped like a black spider between your legs/ And cried/ ‘My children, my children/ They are lost to us,’” or distant waves and waves of distant love” (“Wide Lovely Eyes”); the album is scattered with bits about aging, memory, and obsession, shadows and light contrasts, the same thematic qualities that plague Nabokov’s Mr. Shadow.Leave it to Nick Cave to actually bring something new to this well-worn artistic conversation. While not always deliberate, the repeated allusions to memory and shadows that run through Push The Sky Away show their relationship to modern analysis of the thematic problem presented in Lolita: the conflict of age and memory. Except that Cave’s representation illustrates the decay of permanently fixed memories, deteriorating willfully in the face of informational mounds and gluts, not Humbert Humbert’s poetic ooze of pedophilia, the contrast of the movement of age and the stasis of memory (or, as expressed by Proust in Time Regained: “Indeed nothing is more painful than this contrast between the mutability of people and the fixity of memory”). Cave’s is that of memories in half-life in accelerating decay: “Wikipedia is heaven/ When you don’t want to remember anymore (“We Real Cool”), or “You’re the best girl I ever had/ Can’t remember anything at all” (“Higgs Boson Blues”). Most of Cave’s characters have the Humbert/shadow problem, yet they exist in a time and space where memory is stored in data banks so that trivial facts (with their strange pertinence on “truth”) can be recalled without the space of the brain being required.Even with all of this depth, Push The Sky Away finds Cave doing more with less lyrically. The closest he comes to a “Babe I’m On Fire,” a “We Call Upon the Author,” or a “There She Goes My Beautiful World” is “Higgs Boson Blues,” but this song at most is still half of the lyrical content of the comparative songs.
Very little is alluded to or explained in terms of “Jubilee Street’s” “fetus on a leash,” or how his use of “We real cool” relates to Gwendolyn Brooks’ first and most well-known poetic line from “The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel.” But much like Brooks’ poem, the relationship to the subjects is made vague for sake of not undermining the relationship and emotional complexity of the subject(s), working musical lyricism’s best quality, the ability to create large expressions with most of the keys missing, the “Iceberg Theory.” This is not something Cave was previously incapable of (“Let Love In,” “Love Letter”), but to have a whole album utilizing pop structural minimalism works to dispel the myth of the hyper-worded, spitting, gothic preacher. It’s a different direction for Cave to exercise poetic license, as in how little can he give the listener while still taking on the darker edges of human memory?We’re generally wont to desire Nick Cave on Grinderman terms, the leering, fiery, spitting, psychosexual beast man, unless you’re one who prefers his tortured piano-ballad crooner side, which this also isn’t. This feels quite markedly different from the other Bad Seeds output, a Cave who sings “And some people say it’s just rock ‘n’ roll/ Oh, but it gets you right down to your soul” over one of the least rock ‘n’ roll things The Bad Seeds have created, a nearly beat-less, spinning synth drone (albeit with a very, very buried guitar). Like the lyrical quality, it’s subtle, not really striking in its differences at first listen, working with less, achieving the same grand gestures that Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds are capable of while not conforming to their previous incarnations. Warren Ellis’ contributions past the violin are quite welcome here and the kind of delivery with which Cave matches the low-end, heavy sounds complement each other incredibly well. And when Cave does yell, when he enters briefly into that fire sermon outfit, it shows that he’s still capable, yet restraining for the sake of dynamic.Gracing these themes of memory stasis vs.
Memory loss without the heavy-handed morality, the effect feels light at first, but this is an album whose transgressions reveal themselves slowly rather than forcefully. Cave’s characters may very well feel like they can’t remember, but it’s the same thing they remember over and over (as the problem transubstantiates from character to writer), and as the ability to misremember disappears, so do the abilities to rely on memory and to create new ones outside of the existing lexicon of collective memory. It’s incredible how well Cave can present a song where both Robert Johnson and Miley Cyrus show up in the same mythology, both as equally important as the other, neither one but a strained memory/invention of a man singing the blues for a scientific event he hardly understands, of which he still vows to preach/tell to his best gal. Is this not how we generally might become? Delusional enlightened beings in the 21st century, the offhand knowledge ready to be recalled whenever we need it, yet never there for us to think upon in a combined selfish and selfless mind, living in our own fictions and “simulated rainy seasons,” crying with dolphins that don’t exist, left to float in a pool of our own mythologies?01.
We No Who U R02. Wide Lovely Eyes03. Water’s Edge04. Jubilee Street05.
Susie Bick
We Real Cool07. Finishing Jubilee Street08. Higgs Boson Blues09. Push The Sky AwayMore about:Links.
Push the Sky Away is the 15th official album by, but it could almost be their first. After 30 years together, the band has effectively come full circle, having completed its evolution from untamed beast to rock dignitary and, via the fearsome alter-ego offshoot Grinderman, back again. Factor in the recent resignation of Mick Harvey (Cave's right hand man since their Boys Next Door days in the late 1970s), and the sudden deep-sixing of Grinderman (as a recording entity, ), and the Bad Seeds' reliably black essence now more closely resembles a blank canvas.Push the Sky Away scans as the Bad Seeds' post-Grinderman comedown album, to be filed alongside statelier turns like 1997's The Boatman's Call and 2001's No More Shall We Part. But where the Bad Seeds' mellow records usually find Cave in pensive, piano-man mode, Push the Sky Away presents an uncharacteristically weightless, eerily atmospheric sound; in lieu of crossover ballads like 'Into My Arms' and 'People Ain't No Good', we have foggy reveries built upon ominously rumbling bass lines, twitchy rhythmic tics, and hushed-voice intimations. It may not erupt with same force as the Bad Seeds' stormiest gestures, but the underlying menace fuelling it remains.The approach bears the influence of Grinderman as much as the Bad Seeds' decidedly more raucous 2008 release,. Though Grinderman was often seen as the Bad Seeds' wild child offspring, it was also a vehicle through which Cave and his increasingly prominent foil, Warren Ellis, could experiment with textures and loops (to the point of spawning a ).
Nick Cave The Bad Seeds Push The Sky Away Rapidshare Files Free
These production intricacies form the bedrock of Push the Sky Away, which is less a showcase for Bad Seeds' powerhouse prowess than a reconstructed fever-dream memory of it, transmuting the familiar into something foreign. There's a sense of the Bad Seeds expanding their sound and unlearning it at the same time. (Drummer Jim Sclavunos wins the Take One for the Team Award here, tempering his usual thunderous thrust for stragetically timed snare-rim taps and brushed-skin driftiness.)The freer, more exploratory bent extends to Cave's lyric sheet.
True to the album's desolate, dead-of-night air, his songs are less narratively focussed, more stream-of-consciousness haze, countering Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!'
S gritty urban milieu with impressionistic images of mermaids and the sea that reinforce the sense of a mind floating away. Tellingly, Cave has his writing for the album was inspired by 'Googling curiosities,' and his lyrical logic follows the same circuitous path as an extended, after-hours web-surfing session, bouncing between subjects profound and frivolous, indulging life-long obsessions and newfound, fleeting fascinations. Bad Seeds albums used to inspire you to reacquaint yourself with folk tales and the Old Testament; this one will have you brushing up on quantum physics, astronomy, and 'Hannah Montana'.That last bit shouldn't come as a surprise: Over the past decade, Cave has shown a greater eagerness to interact with contemporary pop culture, from the Oprah shout-out on Grinderman's 'Kitchenette' to the comically perverse Avril Lavigne fixation that formed a subplot in his 2009 novel, The Death of Bunny Munro. But where these namedrops have felt like humourous incongruities in Cave's fire-and-brimstone universe, Push the Sky Away straight-facedly acknowledges how modern phenomena like Wikipedia and Miley Cyrus hold as much sway over the populace as the Bible and Robert Johnson once did, while translating brooding ballads into text-speak and slang ('We No Who U R').
