Best Albums of the 2010s: Number 7 - "Push The Sky Away" by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

Whilst last year's "Ghosteen" and "Skeleton Tree" from 2016 have hoovered up plaudits aplenty, it is the album that proceeds those two companion pieces that makes the cut as one of the best albums of the last decade.

It marks the beginning of the shift from his more traditional song based work to the more ethereal style of those two most recent works. The unique mix of the carnal, spiritual and sinister that runs like a thread of DNA through his catalogue is perfectly balanced here against the film soundtracks that he and Warren Ellis have dragged their work towards.

Rhythmic pulsing underpins many of the songs like a spine holding everything together, over which the varying layers and styles drift in and out like the tide coming and going.
Those tides reach a couple crescendos with "Mermaids" and "Higgs Boson Blues" before the beautiful, elegiac, (and almost foreshadowing what was to come), title track breaks like a wave upon the shore and sets us up perfectly for "Skeleton Tree".

Is this his finest album? No, but it is the best one he released in the 2010s. I'd still have "The Boatman's Call" as his absolute peak, followed by "No More Shall We Part" and "Abbatoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus"

Cave has always been a master of mood, ebb and flow, and dark intensity; he does not disappoint here. The reason I rate this album so highly is that fans of all his styles will find something to enjoy here, it is a microcosm of his whole career, with no one point overwhelming, leaving you always wanting more.

I'll leave the final word to Mr Cave himself,

"And some people say it's just rock and roll, but it gets you right down to your soul....."

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