After 30 years together and 15 albums, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds scored their first No 1 album in New Zealand this week with Push the Sky Away. Though that's probably one of the more minor career highs on Mr Cave's accomplished CV (although his books could do with a bit of work), to have music as beautiful, dark, and fascinating as this at the top of the charts is something special.
It is arguably the band's most accessible work to date. For starters, there are no venomous, fiery songs like those on 1988's Tender Prey that fans will be able to break out some high kicks to. Push the Sky Away is soothing and hypnotic, yet somehow still weird, wonderful, and baffling.
The best song, Jubilee Street, is almost middle-of-the-road by Cave's standards - until near the end of its six-and-a-half minutes, when it starts to escalate as if an entire orchestra has just joined in the jam.
And it's such a good song that Cave even wrote a tune about writing it, the equally brilliant Finishing Jubilee Street.
It is the first album not to feature guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Mick Harvey, a key Bad Seed for many years who was sacked in 2009 (he is doing a solo tour in New Zealand during March). Though other Bad Seeds members have contributed to songwriting in the past, on this album Cave and Warren Ellis, the crazy violinist-cum-mad-multi-instrumentalist who collaborates with Cave on film soundtracks (most notably the score to The Proposition) and the restless and volatile Grinderman records, are the almost exclusive songwriting team.
