100 Beats

Few bands can express so much with so little. On Push the Sky Away, the fifteenth studio album from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, the Australian legends use minimalist, slow-crawling backdrops to spotlight Cave’s macabre-as-always, sex- and death-obsessed lyrical ruminations. Guitars don’t riff; they quiver. The string sections hang in the air like meandering ghosts. Only two of the album’s nine tracks build into anything remotely resembling rock ‘n’ roll. But the simplicity creates musical spaces simultaneously wide-open and chokingly claustrophobic – the perfect setting for Cave’s unnerving narratives of sexual impulse and existential pondering, all with a pinch of pitch-black humor. In the rickety, crumbling “Mermaids,” Cave admits, “I believe in God. I believe in mermaids, too. I believe in 72 virgins on a chain – why not?” In the death dance “Waters Edge,” young boys hide behind rocks, watching city girls dance naked on the beach, tormented by desire. From choirboys to convicts, everyone can find a dark piece of themselves in Push the Sky Away.