Have you ever witnessed a more smiling Nick Cave—his Bad Seeds, too—than you have during his 2025 tour for latest album Wild God?
I haven’t. Certainly not since a then decidedly unsmiling Cave and his then decidedly unsmiling Bad Seeds (Barry Adamson, Blixa Bargeld, Mick Harvey) released and toured behind debut LP From Her To Eternity in 1984.
Then again, Cave—and, by extension, his Bad Seeds, including multi-instrumentalist/de facto bandleader Warren Ellis—forged for himself and his aesthetic a redemption arc from that of the initial menace of his solo career’s start after the sad tragedies that befell his family over the past decade. The catalog of violence-driven characters and furiously dire narratives that once cut like a knife, fresh with blood and angrily amped-up, have been replaced (in part; certainly, they live within his current concert set lists, albeit to a lesser extent) by a sense of communion and community in the beautiful softness of his recent albums, his deeply empathetic Red Hand Files newsletters and during his live shows since 2015.
Perhaps Cave said it best on his song “Ghosteen Speaks”: “I am beside you; you are beside me” and “I think my friends have gathered here for me.”
With all this, the gospel fervor that has long been part of Cave’s thing is now ramped-up higher and holier in his musical mix (lusher chord changes, a keyboard heavy on the French horns, a heaven-bound layering of background vocals) and its staging, as those same vocalists are adorned in churchy robes and vestments. Cave plays with and teases his assembled masses, clutching their hands tightly, leaping from piano to the crowd and back again so often, and with such force, it’s as if he’s prepping for a stage dive that never happens. You could feel the tactile force of his bony chest on the front row’s hands from feet away. As Cave fell to his knees during “Song Of The Lake,” finding heaven while feeling the drag of hell at the lip of the Met’s stage, he could’ve been swallowed into the pit like Sebastian in the sweltering Southern gothic of Suddenly Last Summer.
Cave ran back and forth through the holy-holy reverie of moody, mid-tempo tracks and gorgeous, deceptively simple ballads from Wild God (“Song Of The Lake,” “Joy,” “Cinnamon Horses,” “Long Dark Night”) with the soaring uplift of his black vocal collaborators and his own voice pitched to the curt-yet-lilting sing-speak of a soft-pedaling auctioneer. It was reminiscent of Neil Diamond on his exhilarating 1972 Hot August Night live album. (Before anyone starts griping, listen to it.)
Add in the rumbling orchestration of this Bad Seeds—the bell-toned tinkle of Jim Sclavunos’ xylophone mixed with the chill of Carly Paradis’ airy keyboards, run through Larry Mullins and Colin Greenwood’s steadying grumbled rhythms, topped by the occasional Warren Ellis mad violin solo—and the cool reserve of Cave’s new music broke sweat at the Met. A lot. With this lot beside him, slow, droning, pensive moments such as Skeleton Tree’s wistful title song and the hauntedly romantic “I Need You” swelled in power and passion equal to Cave’s vocal command.
What’s fascinating, then, in poring through past Cave/Bad Seeds material in a live setting, is how the savage energy, imperiling characters and overarching blood lust was all maintained without letting the ball(s) drop. That meant turning the disquieting Elvis rant of “Tupelo” into something insistently throbbing and nearly tribal in its undulation. “Jubilee Street” was less heartbeat-palpitating than usual, yet no less impassioned, especially considering its slow boil into a rave-up finale. The menace of Sclavunos’ vibes (literal, figurative) and Cave’s guttural barking through “From Her To Eternity” made the musky track both highly elegant and deeply, dirtily primal.
“The Weeping Song” became an interactive feast as Cave pulled his Philadelphia fans into a fast-yet-precise exercise in rhythmic hand-clapping. “The Mercy Seat,” still my favorite of Cave’s epically ascending melodies, still sounded transformative as strummy acoustic guitars and military drum rolls lifted its way. While a similar strum guided the drama of “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry,” the glam gospel of “White Elephant” was given greater force by its “kingdom in the sky” chorus and the march of the background vocalists to the front of the stage with Cave.
As a final encore’s last breath, Cave—without his expanded Bad Seeds—played piano, stared into a camera whose image stood large behind him and crooned what is now his love-song anthem: “Into My Arms.” Its lyrics about an interventionist God never cease to stop me in my tracks.
What was once an exercise in mayhem and ire for Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds is now a show of the ecstatic and the fantastic.
—A.D. Amorosi; photos by Chris Sikich
