Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds Turn Raucous Minneapolis Show Into a Tent Revival
All hail "Wild God"
Like many elder millennials, my first exposure to Nick Cave wasn’t seeing the Birthday Party slay a bar in Berlin, or hearing such early Bad Seeds essentials as From Her to Eternity, Your Funeral… My Trial and Tender Prey.
It was the histrionic use of “Red Right Hand” in the horror movie Scream — a music supervisor move so fitting it became the franchise’s unofficial theme, as much a part of its iconic Ghostface character as the killer’s grotesque mask. According to Bloody Disgusting’s oral history of the song’s recurring pop cultural role, Cave’s own kids thought its cameo was peak dad-being-cool, making him more than happy to reboot the original recording with a 30-piece string section and plot-appropriate lyrics on the Scream 3 soundtrack.
Given its immediate onscreen impact and lingering popularity, you’d think last Sunday’s performance of the song at Minneapolis’ hangar-like Armory would have been a runaway highlight. While it was certainly entertaining — a self-aware instance of Giving the People What They Want rather than resisting it like Radiohead — it was not the best part of the Bad Seeds’ spry two-and-a-half-hour set.
Depending on your disposition, that distinction could have been a split decision between a thunderous Elvis nod (“Tupelo”); a generous encore that started with a snarl (“Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry”) and ended with a solo piano singalong (“Into My Arms”); and several of the eight Wild God songs that revealed their raw power alongside Cave’s widescreen band and such welcome touring members as Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood, keyboardist Carly Paradis, and a robust choir rounded out by Wendi Rose, Janet Ramus, T Jae Cole and Miça Townsend. (Ramus also nailed PJ Harvey’s parts in a tour premiere of the rarely performed “Henry Lee.”)
Cave clearly wasn’t kidding when he declared “there’s no fucking around with this record. When it hits, it hits. It lifts you. It moves you. I love that about it.”
In many ways, Wild God is the psychic and spiritual release Cave has been working towards since the tragic death of his son Arthur a decade ago. Unlike the spare arrangements and relative restraint of the Bad Seeds’ last two LPs (2016’s Skeleton Tree and 2019’s Ghosteen), it bursts forth with bright orchestral movements and pure bombast that benefits from the final touches of mixing board maestro Dave Fridmann (see also: such windswept albums as The Flaming Lips’ Soft Bulletin, The Delgados’ Hate, and Mercury Rev’s Deserter’s Songs).
More importantly, Wild God provides hints of not just hope, but full-on joy in the face of the sorrow we all must feel at some point. Cave explained his evolving perspective in a revealing Stephen Colbert interview, which included this insightful stance on the metaphorical fork in a road he faced not that long ago: “We have a choice, I think. On some level, there’s a desire to turn inward and sort of wrap ourselves around the absence of the person that we’ve lost… I think this is a very dangerous situation, and a mistake. We must be able to turn ourselves the other way — [to] look at the world and understand that [it] is full of people who have lost things.”
He continued, “We need to understand that that is what we are. I’ve found by looking at the world in that way, that I saw the world not as a cruel place, but as an extraordinarily, systemically beautiful place to live in… There is joy, and there is happiness, in a way you could have never believed possible on the other side of grief.”
In recent years, Cave has applied this mindset to a strikingly intimate solo tour and more than 300 editions of an Ask Me Anything-style newsletter called The Red Hand Files. Unlike the playful, piss-taking products on his Cave Things store, it can be deadly serious, incredibly thoughtful, and completely devoid of irony — a blessing to his bigger-than-ever legion of devoted fans.
The same could be said for the Bad Seeds’ current run of climatic shows. Aside from boasting such best-of staples as “The Weeping Song,” “The Mercy Seat” and an increasingly tense “Jubilee Street,” the band’s airtight Minneapolis performance elevated the “Stagger Lee”-esque menace and rapturous denouement of “White Elephant” (a highlight from the collaborative Warren Ellis album Carnage), offered a touching Rowland S. Howard tribute (the pre-Birthday Party cover “Shivers”), and broke just about every barrier —literally and figuratively — one could expect from a venue that holds as many as 8,000 screaming fans.
Cave didn’t just strut across a catwalk that stretched across the entire stage. He screamed “you’re beautiful!” right at the front row, and meant it. He reminded us “we’ve all had too much sorrow; now is the time for joy” in a way that was deeply relatable, not melodramatic and maudlin. And he looked people directly in the eyes and held their hands the way a Sunday preacher or funeral director would, as if to quietly say, “I see you. That pain? I’ve felt it. In fact, I’ve been to hell and back. And thanks to you, I feel better than ever before.”
SETLIST
Frogs
Wild God
Song of the Lake
O Children
Jubilee Street
From Her to Eternity
Long Dark Night
Cinnamon Horses
Tupelo
Conversion
Bright Horses
Joy
I Need You
Carnage
Final Rescue Attempt
Red Right Hand
The Mercy Seat
White Elephant
ENCORE
Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry
The Weeping Song
Henry Lee
Shivers
Into My Arms
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