Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, leaping toward love and transcendence at the Met Philly
The Australian songwriter and band leader ministered to his people on the Wild God Tour in his first Philly show in eight years.
Church services were held Saturday night rather than Sunday morning on North Broad Street, with a lanky, vampiric preacher in suit and tie accompanied by a thundering band and gospel singers in glittering gowns.
The holy man ministering to his people at the sold-out Met Philly — an opera house with a history as a house of worship — was Nick Cave, the Australian baritone-voiced goth-punk rock star who was accompanied by his longtime band, the Bad Seeds, on the Wild God Tour.
It was a performance both sacred and profane by the songwriter and bandleader who was back in the city he relished referring to as “F—’ Philadelphia!” for the first time since 2017.
The show began with Cave at the edge of the stage, pressing the flesh with his people on ”Frogs,” with the five musicians (including gray-bearded whirling dervish violinist Warren Ellis) and four vocalists of the Bad Seeds wailing behind him.
That song from last year’s Wild God references Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down” and uses amphibians as a metaphor for “all of humanity — momentarily leaping toward love, wonder, meaning and transcendence, only to land in the gutter again,“ as Cave has explained in his remarkable online advice column the Red Hand Files.
Two and a half thrilling hours later, tie loosened and then tossed aside, Cave, 67 and appearing remarkably well-preserved, sat alone at the grand piano for “Into My Arms,” a tender love song from his 1997 album The Boatman’s Call.
“I don’t believe in an interventionist God,” he sang. But if he could summon faith in such a deity, he would ask them “not to intervene when it came to you” and “direct you into my arms.”
Cave’s assembled flock — united in their love of Nick and the color black — sang along in unison: “Into my arms, O Lord, into my arms” in a prayer-like coda to an evening of emotional tumult.
A Nick Cave show is about ultimate spiritual uplift, after a journey through dark passages.
Early on, before “O Children,” Cave talked about the song from his 2004 Abbatoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus album which was also featured in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 as a “typical mid-period Nick Cave, holding everything in contempt, blaming everyone.”
It’s also a song “about the world’s inability to protect its kids” that keeps “finding its theme,” said Cave, whose recent fully mature and open-hearted work, from his 2019 album Ghosteen to his 2022 book Faith, Hope and Carnage and last year’s Wild God, have been shaped by the grief over the tragic deaths of his sons Arthur, in 2015, and Jethro in 2022.
Later, he dedicated Wild God’s “Long Dark Night,” in which he sang “Things were not so good, I can’t make light of it / My poor soul, it was having a dark night of it,” to Hal Willner, the famously imaginative music producer and Philadelphia native who died in 2020 in the early days of COVID. He called Willner “a great friend, producer, comedian.”
Before “Tupelo,” Cave talked about Elvis Presley, “a particular hero of mine,” then conjured a maelstrom of sound from the Bad Seeds reflective of his mythological telling of the story of the night of Presley’s birth, when a storm raged so violently that “no bird can fly, no fish can swim.”
Since his earliest days leading fire-and-brimstone punks The Birthday Party in suburban Melbourne in the late 1970s, Cave has drawn on American vernacular music forms like blues and rockabilly, fired with biblical fervor and an outsider perspective.
On Saturday, that full-blooded passion was brought to bear with a band that included Ellis, bassist Colin Greenwood (on loan from Radiohead), keyboard player Carly Paradis, guitarist George Vjestica, drummers and percussionists Jim Sclavunos and Larry Mullins, and vocalists Janet Remus, T Jae Cole, Miça Townsend and Wendy Rose.
The core of the evening came in a mid-show stretch that began with “Bright Horses,” in which Cave sang of a world in which “Everyone is hidden, everyone is cruel / There’s no shortage of tyrants, there’s no shortage of fools,” while Ellis let out a wordless cry.
That was followed by Wild God’s centerpiece, “Joy,” which began with Cave at the piano singing, “I woke up this morning with the blues all around my bed / I had the feeling someone in my family was dead.”
But grief would be illuminated with shimmering beauty, and grace reified, as the singer was visited by the spirit of “a flaming boy” who advises: “We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy.”
Throughout, Cave was a man in motion, sprinting from the lip of the stage to the piano and back, with a giant image of his head on the video screen frequently looming behind him.
Toward the end of the show, after “The Mercy Seat,” a 1988 song about a man preparing for his execution later covered by Johnny Cash, Cave brought the silver-robed singers to the front of the stage.
They joined him on an encore that included “The Weeping Song,” from his 1990 album The Good Son.
“This is a weeping song, a song in which to weep,” he sang, with the symbiotic support of a faithful audience, joining him in a collective promise. “This is a weeping song. But I won’t be weeping long.”