Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – Higgs Boson Blues
{Just heard that there is a live webcast of the album release show here in Los Angeles, Thursday, Feb. 21st at the Fonda. You can watch Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds in all their sartorial and sonic splendor through RFB’s Youtube Channel at 8:45 West Coast Time}
Any new music from Nick Cave is a thing to be celebrated. The fact that along with his band, the Bad Seeds, the man has arguably never released a bad record is quite an achievement. Perhaps I’m biased. I’ve been a fan since around 1994, when I first truly heard the band’s music on Album 88 and a performance at Lollapalooza that year sealed the deal. Unlike the last album, Dig Lazarus Dig, which clearly was influenced by the Grinderman project and had a bit more of an edge and groove to the music, Push The Sky Away, tones things down considerably, with much darker tones to the music and much more epic sweeps the music. This is not a record to listen to while the sun is still up, it’s an album built for cruising dark city streets well after midnight, where menace or salvation lurks around every corner.
All of that is on display in the longest track on the album the track that feels like the centerpiece of the album, even though it’s the next to last track, “the Higgs Boson Blues.” The track I think also showcases Cave’s singing more than any other track on the album, (I still dream about Cave releasing an album in a stricter jazz or blues style, but I recognize that’s just his style). Just yesterday I was reading about some of the Higgs Boson discoveries, filled with more than a bit of dread, much of which is hinted at throughout the song. I don’t know what possessed Cave to fit Miley Cyrus into this tale, but he’s probably the only songwriter around that could pull off a Hannah Montana reference + hint at the future suicide of Cyrus, while also musing about Higgs Boson, Robert Johnson & the Devil and the assassination of MLK, and still have it all strangely make sense. Push The Sky Away is a worthy addition to the long catalog of Nick Cave, sure to be one of my favorites of the year.
Another example of the style and sound of this new record is “Jubilee Street” which has a suitably seedy video, made all the cooler by that classic Nick Cave strut as we walks down the titled street: