Imagine you’re in a bar. It’s not just the kind of dark, dingy bar where everyone has his coat collars up, nursing a beer in the corner, but a bar where everyone is also hyper-literate. This is a bar that could only exist in a dream—or better yet, a nightmare. At least the jukebox would have this album, though.

Actually, this bar did exist—kind of. If you recall, there are a few scenes in “Shrek 2” that take place in a sad little bar where Captain Hook plays piano, and one of the songs was “People Ain’t No Good” from Nick Cave’s masterpiece, “The Boatman’s Call.”

While “Push the Sky Away” may not reach the excellence of “The Boatman’s Call,” the 42-minute, nine-song album is a twisted and incredible journey. The opening song, “We No Who U R,” looks like the title of a Ke$ha song, but the first minute sounds almost like a track by The xx. The sparse production, echoing drum part and vocal harmonies are beautiful, but what really shows how different the album will be is the haunting flute part.

The next song, “Wide Lovely Eyes,” despite its repetitive and dissonant guitar riff, has the most easily recognizable beauty on the album. When he tries, as he does on this song, Nick Cave is among the best at making slow, sad love songs. His baritone powers effortlessly over the harmonies with a breathtaking grace that is too often absent on the album.

The lyrics in “Water’s Edge” border on stream-of-consciousness with some creepy sexual innuendo. The album really takes off at “Jubilee Street,” in which the strings introduced in “Water’s Edge” reappear and ascend. While it’s not a song of jubilation, as he states in the last line of lyrics, he is “flying.” This lasts for another minute as a screeching guitar solo takes the song to its fade-out.

As weird as the first half of the album is, it only gets weirder. “Finishing Jubilee Street” is a marvel of meta-art, and the seven-minute-long “Higgs Boson Blues” is, among other things, a love song to Hannah Montana. The album ends with the titular song; it is a slow but terrifying end to the album thanks to its long, wavering notes. The sounds make you feel as if you’re falling into the sky, not pushing it away. In his 15th studio album, Cave knows exactly what he wants and how to make his music effective. This is no album to shake off the February blues, but the journey it takes you on will shake you up.