A (mostly) solo Nick Cave reinterprets his songbook
For the bulk of the past 40 years, you could most often find Australian auteur Nick Cave on stage at the head of the Bad Seeds, a unit he’s guided from punk-blues caterwaul to brooding balladry and back again since their early ’80s formation. But as the band’s sound grew more skeletal and sparse over the course of their 2010s output, Cave’s willingness to venture out on tour without the backing of the whole brigade grew too. First came shows pairing freewheeling audience Q&As with short sets, then a trek with bandmate Warren Ellis and a small ensemble supporting the duo’s 2021 collaboration “Carnage,” and finally, this fall’s full-show explorations of the entire Cave songbook, solo.
Well, almost. Bassist Colin Greenwood (of currently-dormant UK art rockers Radiohead) is holding down the low end against Cave’s grand piano as needed throughout the tour. But from the moment Cave took the stage Tuesday evening at the Boch Center Wang Theatre, to the first of many rapturous ovations, it was clearly his show alone.
Cave’s subsequent overview of the program promised, in a tone of sly self-deprecation, “very reduced versions” of material new and old. And indeed, the set tackled disparate corners of a vast discography by paring down songs to their base elements. The absence of a full band granted Cave not only the ability to approach four decades of music on an even playing field, but also the space to toy with rhythm and phrasing in ways that made familiar songs unpredictable. Through reduction came revelation.
Among the numbers most transformed were some of the Bad Seeds’ barnburners. Death-row soliloquy “The Mercy Seat” and catalog of terrors “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry” became freshly compelling in their stark arrangements. Songs more conventionally suited to the setting shined too, particularly when Cave reached for the richly rendered heartbreak of 1997’s “The Boatman’s Call” or invoked the somber beauty of latterday records “Ghosteen” and “Skeleton Tree.”
The two-hour set hinged primarily on the 17-LP Bad Seeds catalog but reached well beyond it, too. Lascivious garage-rock side project Grinderman got its nod (albeit with one of its less lascivious songs, the buoyant “Palaces of Montezuma”), and Cave dove all the way back to 1979 for “Shivers,” the cult-favorite single from his very first band penned by late guitarist Rowland S. Howard.
Amid the music, Cave struck a playful rapport with a vocal crowd, riffing on (if not fulfilling) shouted requests and offering a bevy of origin stories and personal musings. The tone contrasted the fire-and-brimstone frontman he often plays with a full band, favoring a gentler means of connection that proved Cave remains a spellbinding performer whether in command of a posse or (mostly) on his own.