foetus on a leash (2013)

This one's a freAK! It might be Cave's most honest album, and at the same time it's his most self-deprecating. And that's honesty, that's life, etc. No southern preacher heroin poet character heralding the apocalypse this time around, Push the Sky Away's Cave knows what Hannah Montana is, he eats, shits, uses text speak, and wikipedias stuff when he's bored and alone. Push the Sky Away's character plays concurrently with the modern and trivial along with the mythical, lyrical, tragic. Articulate lapses into the inarticulate defy expectations of Cave's previous incarnations- the junkie genius, the faultless encyclopedic songwriter, the preacher, the vampire, the sex-crazed dirty-old-man- surely offering a reminder of their construction as, well, constructions. The narratives are still there, but diminished. What's left for fans is an emergent honesty, an identity aware of its age, obsessions, flaws, and desires, the same one which attempts to mislead us through the act of placing a song called Finishing Jubilee Street three tracks after one called Jubilee Street. The one that made the damn record, not the one in the song. And that's bold. Awkward, but bold.

Musically Mick Harvey's absence is noticed, but The Bad Seeds have mastered making simplicity and repetition hypnotic in his absence. I'm unsure where it'll go next, but for now everything feels right, bare and desolate as it all is.

A-

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