Push the Sky Away is hot-cold and brilliant blue. A harsh, suited Cave peels open the blinds to illuminate his naked wife on the record sleeve. Inside he sings about mermaids.

Fifteen albums ago Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds debuted with a grating gothic gad of a record, which opened with a twisted, screeching interpretation of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Avalanche’. The latest album is the closest that Cave has come to his inspirer’s sound and husky voice. Cave however has certainly injected a lot of his current life and surroundings into the lyrics: these songs could only have been written by an aging rocker, recently moved to Brighton. We hear described at length how ‘those city girls’ come down to Brighton and ‘take apart their bodies like toys for the local boys’: the tone is subtly sexist. He envies ‘our’ playful local boys and their ‘toys’ and condemns ‘those city girls’ who deploy a ‘bible of tricks’. This plays into the gaze of a 55yr old man who clearly still feels some of the angst of his (alt-rock) youth as he is once more rejected by his lusts. ‘Mermaids’ is a dreamy elegy to the ‘mermaids’ that the poet watches ‘sunning themselves on the rocks’: fluid guitar strums and gentle percussion flow by like the years in a life.

Mermaid is, however, one of the few songs to feature guitars - reminding us of the absence of founding band mate and guitarist Mick Harvey who left shortly after album #14. Fortunately this seems not to have hindered the record, and Warren Ellis’s diverse instruments (from bozouki to flute) watercolour the tracks with wave-like sounds. The sharp, biting snares of their last album are nowhere to be seen. The slow and minimalist album holds within it a darkness characteristic of Cave’s work, but here sweeter sounds are also used to the same effect. Only hints of the bands roots can be heard in the sparse bassiness of ‘We Real Cool’ and of their love songs in ‘Wide Lovely Eyes’.

In fact the love songs seem to have been replaced with tales of guilty lust: ‘Jubilee Street’ is sung partly in the persona of a prostitute’s customer. More bizarre though, is the following ‘Finishing Jubilee Street’ where Cave sings of his dream the night after writing the former. From Queen to the Arctic Monkeys, prostitution is a staple theme in rock music; this post-modern appendix is a creepy addition percussed with eerie dream-like beats. “I believed I’d taken a bride… in my dream the girl was very young”… the idea runs on from his seaside voyeurism earlier in the album. This time it appears more stark and disconcerting.

‘Push Away the Sky' ends on a note of light to contrast with the water of before. The epic (8 minute) penultimate track ‘Higgs Boson Blues’ is a dramatic (not to mention bluesy) raconteur’s tale of soul selling and evil, featuring Lucifer himself alongside Miley Cyrus. The song is full of references which I confess compelled me to do a fair bit of research to understand. According to the album webpage, Wikipedia had a strong influence on the writing process- Cave even sings its praises at one point in the record. It is not an easy album to appreciate - we are made to work for it. The music is confusing at times and blunt and unsettling at others. But it holds a beauty for those that would allow themselves to be gripped.