Within a Sky Full of Earth

This must be a pretty hell of a coincidence. As we are trying to dig ourselves into our new place in St. Lazarus, the district of Macau near Tap Seac, set by the local government as a Creative Industries area, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds release their new album called “Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!!” Well, I like to think that they made it just for us. To push ourselves further inside of it. "Go!", they say. "Dig for it!"
The first video, as usual, is available at Bloom TV (courtesy of YouTube and the MuteChannel, thank you very much!). Nick Cave returns to the Bible, his first and favorite subject. It's a crazy song. “Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!!” is a song written by Nick Cave and was released by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds as a single on February 18th, 2008. It is the title track from the new album. The song, like much of the band's recent work, was produced by Nick Launay. and has been available to be listen to on the band's official website since Christmas Day, 2007. In a journal available at the Nick Cave Exhibition, it is revealed that an earlier version was instead about a man who was dead, who when he was saying "I don't know what it is but there's definitely something going on upstairs" referring to continuing brain activity, who never asked to be raised from the tomb and then ends up homeless and slave, and finally dead.
This is how Cave describes the whole record:

Ever since I can remember hearing the Lazarus story, when I was a kid, you know, back in church, I was disturbed and worried by it. Traumatized, actually. We are all, of course, in awe of the greatest of Christ's miracles - raising a man from the dead - but I couldn't help but wonder how Lazarus felt about it. As a child it gave me the creeps, to be honest. I've taken Lazarus and stuck him in New York City, in order to give the song, a hip, contemporary feel. I was also thinking about Harry Houdini who spent a lot of his life trying to debunk the spiritualists who were cashing in on the bereaved. He believed there was nothing going on beyond the grave. He was the second greatest escapologist, Harry was, Lazarus, of course, being the greatest. I wanted to create a kind of vehicle, a medium, for Houdini to speak to us if he so desires, you know, from beyond the grave.

At current reviews all the critical voices gave them a mass high mark. It seems that Nick Cave is set loose, he and his moustache, since his project called The Grinderman, and goes wilder than ever in the last years of his career. Fuck the "Love Song", he might have said. Check the reviews on the bottom, but first of all load on to the video clip here. The video was directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard and features Cave walking towards the camera in a strut fashion, singing the song, whilst images of New York pass by him. During the chorus, the images of New York are replaced by the members of the Bad Seeds dancing. Nick Cave will turn 51 next September 22.

REVIEWS: The Observer • The Guardian • The Sun • On Record • Gigwise • NME • The Independent • The Times

AGAIN:
Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!! - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
[GO TO THEIR 'MYSPACE' SITE AND HEAR ALL THE RECORD]