Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Push the Sky Away

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Nick Cave has come up with a new way to tell his stories, said Glenn Gamboa in Newsday. On the first Bad Seeds album that the Australian singer-songwriter has made without guitarist and collaborator Mick Harvey, he builds his songs around looped guitar tracks, which provide “a more laid-back and contemplative” sonic landscape and force him to focus his storytelling. Though “Cave’s operatics and dinner-theater antics” still create distractions, there are moments here “as lovely as anything in his repertoire,” said Jason Gubbels in Spin. The “music-box piano chimes” on “We No Who U R” and the “dulcet choruses” of “Finishing Jubilee Street” offer gentle pleasures, while Cave’s poetic lyrics steal the show. He echoes William Blake on “Water’s Edge” and calls out pop-culture figures from Robert Johnson to Miley Cyrus in “Higgs Boson Blues,” a nearly eight-minute-long exercise in absurdist shaggy-dog storytelling. “As always, just beyond Cave’s solemnity, there’s wicked and lovely fun to be had.”