Sometimes, simple is better. So is playing to your strengths, something Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds are experts at.
This song, Higgs Boson Blues, from their terrific (though not as catchy as previous releases) album Push The Sky Away is built around one simple groove, but layered and textured with multiple levels of restraint and taste captured brilliantly by directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, and cinematographer Lol Crawley.
The hirsute men comprising The Bad Seeds (currently Warren Ellis - not the comic book writer - Martin P. Casey, Conway Savage, Thomas Wylder and Jim Sclavunos) are capable of rocking out with the best of them - they are, in fact, among the best of them - but they are just as adept at holding back and letting Nick Cave unroll his storylines where they need to go.
In this case, from Robert Johnson's selling his soul to the Devil (for better guitar skills) through to current-day Geneva, home of CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research) where the so-called ''God-particle'' (Higgs-Boson) was discovered, he weaves a cautionary tale that the only certainty we have about the future is death, and we will get there anyhow, no matter the path taken, and that everything in between is at best a discovery, at worst trivial (death of a pop icon, hereby represented by Miley Cyrus, pre-VMAs/naked meltdown, ironically), and the middle just tragic (the fatal shooting of Martin Luther King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis).
All told through a golden voice meant to lure nubile young females into dark places.
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