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In case you haven’t noticed, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds have stopped screwing about in order to REALLY mess with your head
Indie | Thursday 19th September 2013 | Poppy
The last album was a tad too catchy, but Push the Sky Away sounds like a lonely shark swimming and rubs your heart like sandpaper.
Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! was a great album; you could actually put it on when folks were over and not upset anybody. But now, I’m beginning to think that was just what Nick Cave did while he was waiting for his Jafar From Aladdin moustache to grow out, using up the ink in a crappy pen he wanted to finish. Violinists were just tuning up and Cave was stood at the kitchen counter, scribbling while he was waiting for the kettle to boil. No, scratch that - Cave probably doesn’t drink tea, more likely he starts his day gargling neat whiskey with screws and washers. Only he must spit out the whiskey, because he doesn’t drink. Anyway, Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! was just a warm-up, an entertaining set of commercials before the Real Deal.
Let me tell you before you surf around for some blessed Youtube rip (it’s been on Spotify for ages, too)- this is not an album to listen with your happy-go-lucky pals over. You’ve got to concentrate to catch the jokes in the lyrics (‘Mermaids’ opens with the line “You were a catch”) amongst the consistently epic storyscapes that either end in tragedy or the urgency that predicts tragedy. You could go for darkness, big headphones, and covers to hide under. Or, when missing your bus home, so you can appreciate your own melodramatic situation.
The perfect serving suggestion for the album’s masterpiece, ‘Higgs Boson Blues’, would probably be to skip dinnner, glance over your worst bills, then watch the ten o’clock news while lacing up some fuck-off boots and buttoning your coat, then head outside and circle the block and hate everybody for eight minutes. Only then I think, then you might be able to channel Cave’s filthy-old-man, five-o’clock-shadow, insomniac, two-fingers-to-the-apocalypse outlook properly.
It’s okay, you can put on the Temptations or something when you get in and have a little dance.
Here is the lyric video to "Higgs Boson Blues":
Poppy Walker
