Cave is an Australian who has lived in the UK and Berlin, but his music bears all the fingerprints of an imagination fascinated with the kind of blues folklore and mythology most vividly embodied first in the novels and ethnographies of Americans like Zora Neal Hurston and later by those who told the myths of Robert Johnson, Cormac McCarthy with his gritty evocations of American culture and James Ellroy's synthesis of jazz idiom and hardboiled crime fiction. There is a lurid, colorful and endless well of material from which Cave has drawn across his career, and he drew from all of it during his set last night.
Mixing American blues and folk ideas with sea shanties (in songs like "The Weeping Song" and "Mermaids") effectively breathed another dimension into the core of Cave's songwriting. And as a performer, he consistently went to the front of the stage and interacted with the crowd directly, quite often going three rows in to stands and gesturing not just to those immediately around him but to people in the balconies and the upper levels nearby. He was in complete command. No one tried to drag him down or take up his hand and delay him from getting back to the stage. Few people make the piano a menacing instrument as this band does. Perhaps Diamanda Galas, whose own allegiance to the world of the blues and folk musical traditions is obvious. What she and Cave have done is to take those ideas and those sounds and find the mythological, epic dimensions contained within them. They paint them large with the music and the emotional intensity of the singing.When Cave went into the seats and stood with the spotlight on him, him encouraging people to come close, it looked like he was ministering to other adherents to the church of rock and roll. It was never more explicit than during the performance of "Tupelo," with its suggested apotheosis of Elvis Presley.
But it wasn't all dark, stormy music, nor darkly tender ballads. Cave took some time out for humor; there's a line in "Higgs Boson Blues" where he name-checks Hannah Montana, and he sang it with a joking sense of confusion. And during the encore, people yelled out the names of various of the band's "Henry" songs. Cave finally said, "Okay, we can play that." Chances are, these guys rarely take requests, but Cave and everyone in the band were in high spirits and seemed glad to take a suggestion.A mixture of the hits and more obscure songs, last night's set by Cave and the Bad Seeds indulged not just themselves but also an audience whose interests span the band's catalogue. In the process, the current seven-piece incarnation of the band displayed the unity of theme, styles and sound that has run through its music from the beginning.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds Set List for Temple Hoyne Buell Theater, Denver, June 24, 20141. We No Who U R 2. Jubilee Street 3. Tupelo 4. Red Right Hand 5. The Weeping Song 6. Mermaids 7. From Her To Eternity 8. West Country Girl 9. Into My Arms 10. God Is In The House 11. Higgs Boson Blues 12. The Mercy Seat 13. Stagger Lee 14. Push The Sky Away
Encore
15.The Ship Song 16. Do You Love Me 17. Papa Won't Leave You, Henry 18. The Lyre of Orpheus
If you'd like to contact me, Tom Murphy, on Twitter, my handle is @simianthinker.
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