- Record Label: Bad Seeds Ltd.
- Release Date: Feb 19, 2013
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
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Entertainment WeeklyFeb 20, 2013The peak of Cave's 15th album with the Bad Seeds is a multidimensional walkabout through sonic shadows and fog. [22 Feb 2013, p.74]
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Feb 15, 2013These are big themes, dealt with imaginatively by a singer and a band both operating at the peak of their powers. Album of the year?
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Feb 13, 2013Experimental yet built on superb songwriting, fresh and surprising but still somehow recognisably a Bad Seeds record, the amount of innovation and inspiration found on Push The Sky Away proves that Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds must still care an awful lot about this rock ‘n’ roll stuff.
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Classic Rock MagazineJun 6, 2013Not only have the Bad Seeds delivered another healthy baby, but perhaps the most gracefully beautiful of the whole brood. [Mar 2013, p.98]
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Feb 25, 2013The lift-off and liberation come subtly, bearing the masterful marks of men who've learned the value of compositional patience (it's no coincidence that Cave and Ellis have also forged a successful partnership as film scorers). This, ultimately, makes the emotional devastation you experience once the record has spun all the more remarkable.
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Feb 22, 2013The absurdity and terror that Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds have so often courted aren’t absent on Push The Sky Away. They’re just muted, and rendered all the more seductive via lush arrangements and Cave’s crooning baritone.
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Feb 19, 2013Richly arranged, masterfully sequenced, and full of brooding, Push the Sky Away combines the stately beauty of The Boatman’s Call and No More Shall We Part with the intensity of Grinderman/Lazarus-era Cave while managing to sound like neither.
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Feb 19, 2013A masterpiece that merges the experimentation and freedom of their side projects with Cave’s most tender songcraft.
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Feb 19, 2013In Push the Sky Away, an album of thrilling darkness pierced by moments of brilliant light, Cave may have crafted his defining statement.
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Feb 14, 2013Potent in its masculine restraint, this record has surely always existed, just waiting to be plucked from the surf; a mercurial, magisterial, stick of seaside rock.
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Feb 14, 2013Even with all of this depth, Push The Sky Away finds Cave doing more with less lyrically.
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Feb 11, 2013An LP as weighty, compelling and brilliant as The Bad Seeds have ever produced.
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Feb 11, 2013Cave is always the first to give fulsome credit to his band, and they aim true here in the most explorative, coherent and well-realised Bad Seeds album in years.
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UncutFeb 11, 2013There's something deeply satisfying about the way the songs fit together as an album, their sequence strengthened both by the homogenous tone of the music with its air of wistful melancholy, and by the way each song seems to push the next one forward. [Mar 2013, p.61]
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Mar 14, 2013While it’s likely that Push the Sky Away will not cause the seas to part before him, it will surely ephemerally deliver us from this evil wasteland of vacant contemporary culture and mutilated morality.
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Feb 19, 2013The album surprises continually, offering humor, crises and redemption within the sound of something as lovely and enticing as it is aggressive and challenging.
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Jun 4, 2013Across the album as a whole he works towards a sort of mid-world territory, between air and water, dream and reality.
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The WireFeb 28, 2013In spite of daft moments, the chilly shimmer of Push The Sky Away works its magic. [Feb 2013, p.45]
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Feb 27, 2013We know better than to call Push The Sky Away Nick Cave’s best album, but if you want a portrait of the artist, as an artist, the album qualifies as “essential” even by the strictest definition.
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Feb 26, 2013It might be their fifteenth album in a 30-year career, but Push The Sky Away proves beyond all doubt--even mine--that the group is still at the top of their game.
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Feb 19, 2013Sometimes his baritone carries lyrics that are blunt and tart, and others opaque and blurry, but never lacking bite.
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Feb 19, 2013Even in a career filled with expansive balladry, there are moments on Push the Sky Away as lovely as anything in his repertoire, from the music-box piano chimes of "We No Who U R" to the "Dress Rehearsal Rag"-strings on "We Real Cool" and the dulcet choruses of "Finishing Jubilee Street" and "Wide Lovely Eyes."
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Feb 19, 2013PTSA may never stare you in the face, but you'd be a fool to turn your back on it. It's carrying a knife.
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Feb 19, 2013This is a very good record indeed, just not the record the more hidebound Cave lifer would instantly press to their breast.
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Feb 15, 2013Freighted deep with lugubrious rolls of oily bass, sandy inhalations of desert strings, holy intonations and salty lust, Push the Sky Away is the audio equivalent of bathing in the Dead Sea.
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Feb 15, 2013While nearly unshakeable in its bleakness, Push the Sky Away is another exemplary effort from the Bad Seeds, and the moodiest entry into the Nick Cave canon in over a decade.
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Feb 15, 2013For all the album's wandering spirit, the first eight tracks on Push the Sky Away are neatly structured into two complementary, four-song halves that mirror one another.
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Feb 14, 2013Sky’s post-post-punk mellowing proves a welcome development, revealing maturity instead of postured snarling.
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Feb 14, 2013There aren't the guitar storms of a Mercy Seat or Do You Love Me? but Jubilee Street--a beguiling tale of brothels and hypocrisy--could quietly become another Seeds classic.
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MojoFeb 11, 2013What you may lose in rock'n'roll kicks you gain in poignancy and poetry. [Mar 2013, p.86]
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Feb 11, 2013Push The Sky Away demonstrates that even in his 30th year, nobody delivers a lyric quite like Nick Cave.
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Mar 1, 2013Push the Sky Away has the ability to move without raising its voice above a whisper.
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Feb 19, 2013Those with a patient appreciation for Cave's dramatic sense, and the ways in which his singular musical voice has evolved over years, will find much to focus on within.
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Feb 19, 2013Lovely strings, flute and backing vocals occasionally shed some light, but mostly this is Cave playing it slow, hushed and haunted.
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MagnetMar 15, 2013Though at times exquisite, the slow-burn even instrumental keel is, ironically, the most jarring aspect of Push The Sky Away. [No. 96, p.52]
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Feb 27, 2013It's a sweet musical reprieve from radio presenters with beaming suicide smiles gracing subway posters with snappy catchphrases.
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Feb 19, 2013The sonic sea change is deliberate, but given what a vastly musical band the Bad Seeds have always been, this more economical approach is jarring and delightfully unsettling.
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Feb 19, 2013It’s a pretty-sounding ugly LP, one that contains its fair share of ghosts, standing in for the sadness and brutality of our time, perhaps even the sadness and brutality of human existence.
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Feb 15, 2013Push the Sky Away, then, is not the Bad Seeds at their zenith, but pretty bloody spectacular for a fifteenth (or seventeenth, or twentieth) album.
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Feb 15, 2013Push the Sky Away’s rewards are interspersed among plenty of frustrating moments, yet even at its worst, it’s a fascinating album.
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Feb 13, 2013There are some wonderful moments, the single ('We No Who U R') and the title track are starkly magnificent, but the general feel is a bit of a comedown.
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Mar 13, 2013It all adds up to a challenging song cycle.
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Feb 19, 2013Push They Sky Away’s oppressively hollow minimalism is both its biggest drawback and its greatest strength.
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Feb 20, 2013Push the Sky Away feels heavy on breath-taking and woodshedding, an album of waiting for sparks to ignite.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 51 out of 56
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Mixed: 5 out of 56
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Negative: 0 out of 56
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Feb 25, 2013
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Feb 19, 2013
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Feb 19, 2013