The Australian singer Nick Cave of the band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Push the Sky Away is the band's 15th album. Nigel Treblin / AFP
The Australian singer Nick Cave of the band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Push the Sky Away is the band's 15th album. Nigel Treblin / AFP

Bad Seeds' Push the Sky Away is all trial and error



Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Push the Sky Away
Bad Seed Ltd
***

After three decades together, Bad Seeds, rock's poet laureate of savage desire and tormented romance, enter a new experimental phase with their 15th album. Methodically shunning the singer Nick Cave's default discomfort zone of gothic melodrama and doomy orchestration, Push the Sky Away is a mostly mellow affair that glides along on spare arrangements, skeletal rhythms, ghostly voices and ambient drones. This is a commendably bold sideways step, if not wholly successful, sounding unfocused and underpowered at times.

The first Bad Seeds album not to feature Cave's long-time musical sideman Mick Harvey is also the first since the 55-year-old Australian crooner shelved his breakaway garage-rock project Grinderman. But the latter group's freewheeling ethos - irreverent, collaborative and improvisational - has clearly spilt over into the looser, more groove-driven songwriting here. There are also echoes of early Velvet Underground and latter-day Leonard Cohen, especially on Wide Lovely Eyes and Mermaids, whose soft, electronic textures and dreamy half-whispered vocals conceal queasy musings on lust, death and sinister events at funfairs.

The most traditional Cave-like song here is Water's Edge: a nagging, prowling, quietly seething murder ballad about city girls meeting a nasty end by the seaside. It is also one of the album's best tracks, perhaps because it has an emotional force and narrative rigour that is lacking elsewhere. Another peak is the dread-filled confessional Jubilee Street, which begins as a stately ballad with overtones of the much-covered 1960s standard Hey Joe, then cranks up slowly into a mighty widescreen roar of guilt-wracked mania, crime and punishment. In a mischievous twist, a later spoken-word track called Finishing Jubilee Street purports to recount a feverish dream Cave experienced immediately after writing the previous song.

Cave's dark humour, often overlooked by his music-press detractors, has become more overtly playful in recent years. The most obviously comic lyric here is Higgs Boson Blues, a slow-burn fantasy epic about an apocalyptic road trip to the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, which manages to weave droll one-liners about Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus into the legend of the diabolically possessed blues pioneer Robert Johnson.

These surreal stream-of-consciousness rambles are amusing enough in small doses, but they ultimately feel more like party tricks than serious songs. That holds true for Push the Sky Away as a whole. While this experimental sideways step is full of interesting sounds and ideas, it ultimately lacks the emotional intensity, romantic poetry and fierce beauty of Cave's best work.

Don't get fined

The UAE FTA requires following to be kept:

  • Records of all supplies and imports of goods and services
  • All tax invoices and tax credit notes
  • Alternative documents related to receiving goods or services
  • All tax invoices and tax credit notes
  • Alternative documents issued
  • Records of goods and services that have been disposed of or used for matters not related to business
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The struggle is on for active managers

David Einhorn closed out 2018 with his biggest annual loss ever for the 22-year-old Greenlight Capital.

The firm’s main hedge fund fell 9 per cent in December, extending this year’s decline to 34 percent, according to an investor update viewed by Bloomberg.

Greenlight posted some of the industry’s best returns in its early years, but has stumbled since losing more than 20 per cent in 2015.

Other value-investing managers have also struggled, as a decade of historically low interest rates and the rise of passive investing and quant trading pushed growth stocks past their inexpensive brethren. Three Bays Capital and SPO Partners & Co., which sought to make wagers on undervalued stocks, closed in 2018. Mr Einhorn has repeatedly expressed his frustration with the poor performance this year, while remaining steadfast in his commitment to value investing.

Greenlight, which posted gains only in May and October, underperformed both the broader market and its peers in 2018. The S&P 500 Index dropped 4.4 per cent, including dividends, while the HFRX Global Hedge Fund Index, an early indicator of industry performance, fell 7 per cent through December. 28.

At the start of the year, Greenlight managed $6.3 billion in assets, according to a regulatory filing. By May, the firm was down to $5.5bn. 

Results

4pm: Maiden (Dirt) Dh165,000 1,600m
Winner: Moshaher, Pat Dobbs (jockey), Doug Watson (trainer).

4.35pm: Handicap (D) Dh165,000 2,200m
Winner: Heraldic, Richard Mullen, Satish Seemar.

5.10pm: Maiden (Turf) Dh165,000 1,600m
Winner: Rua Augusta, Harry Bentley, Ahmad bin Harmash.

5.45pm: Handicap (D) Dh190,000 1,200m
Winner: Private’s Cove, Mickael Barzalona, Sandeep Jadhav.

6.20pm: Handicap (T) Dh190,000 1,600m
Winner: Azmaam, Jim Crowley, Musabah Al Muhairi.

6.55pm: Handicap (D) Dh190,000 1,400m
Winner: Bochart, Richard Mullen, Satish Seemar.

7.30pm: Handicap (T) Dh190,000 2,000m
Winner: Rio Tigre, Mickael Barzalona, Sandeep Jadhav.

THE BIO: Martin Van Almsick

Hometown: Cologne, Germany

Family: Wife Hanan Ahmed and their three children, Marrah (23), Tibijan (19), Amon (13)

Favourite dessert: Umm Ali with dark camel milk chocolate flakes

Favourite hobby: Football

Breakfast routine: a tall glass of camel milk

How to protect yourself when air quality drops

Install an air filter in your home.

Close your windows and turn on the AC.

Shower or bath after being outside.

Wear a face mask.

Stay indoors when conditions are particularly poor.

If driving, turn your engine off when stationary.

COMPANY PROFILE
Name: ARDH Collective
Based: Dubai
Founders: Alhaan Ahmed, Alyina Ahmed and Maximo Tettamanzi
Sector: Sustainability
Total funding: Self funded
Number of employees: 4
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Almnssa
Started: August 2020
Founder: Areej Selmi
Based: Gaza
Sectors: Internet, e-commerce
Investments: Grants/private funding
Game Changer

Director: Shankar 

Stars: Ram Charan, Kiara Advani, Anjali, S J Suryah, Jayaram

Rating: 2/5

The years Ramadan fell in May

1987

1954

1921

1888

UNSC Elections 2022-23

Seats open:

  • Two for Africa Group
  • One for Asia-Pacific Group (traditionally Arab state or Tunisia)
  • One for Latin America and Caribbean Group
  • One for Eastern Europe Group

Countries so far running: 

  • UAE
  • Albania 
  • Brazil 
Brief scores:

Toss: Nepal, chose to field

UAE 153-6: Shaiman (59), Usman (30); Regmi 2-23

Nepal 132-7: Jora 53 not out; Zahoor 2-17

Result: UAE won by 21 runs

Series: UAE lead 1-0