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To these ears, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! is the finest album of the last couple of years. Add to that Cave’s fearsome live reputation, and this tour was set up to be one of the highlights of the year.
First come Joe Gideon & the Shark, a London-based duo who epitomise Nick Cave’s excellent taste in support acts. Gideon half-speaks, half-sings lyrics against sensitive and violent blues riffs. His sister, The Shark, arrives on stage looking like Feist, but in no time after sitting in a ring of drums, keyboards and sampling equipment, it becomes clear that she is something altogether more primal. She hammers the drums, builds loops up more tightly and uses them more hypnotically than anyone I’ve seen before, and hurls the occasional scream or yelp into the mix. Hide & Seek, a song about ‘a really bad day at school’ is a pulsating highlight.
The excitement when the Bad Seeds take to the stage is immense, and with Hold On To Yourself’s ebb and flow they gently lull the crowd into a false sense of security, before the onset of heavier rock songs. These include Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!’s 70s groove, and compelling versions of crowd favourites Nature Boy and Red Right Hand.
this tour was set up to be one of the highlights of the year.
A tender interlude changes the pace. With some band members leaving the stage, Cave moves to the piano for middle-America satire God Is In The House, and People Ain’t No Good. An absorbing pair of songs, the rhythmic Moonland and The Mercy Seat, followed. The latter’s climax, with its depiction of a man on death row comparing himself to Christ on the cross, provides the most emotionally intense moment of the night, the start of each subsequent stanza a further pounding on death’s door.
The Bad Seeds are impeccably united as an ensemble. While they play, brief glances and words show a host of relationships between seven performers. The greatest of these is between Nick Cave and right hand man Warren Ellis. Mostly invisible, their chemistry is best exhibited in album highlight We Call Upon The Author:-
Ellis writhes around on the floor, controlling multiple loops and pedals and occasionally stretching to the suspended microphone for ‘doop doop’ backing vocals. He perfectly compliments Cave’s charisma and lyrical prowess, with the pounding beat backing rants about ‘myxomatoid kids spraddling the streets’ and poet John Berryman ‘going the Heming-way’ (committing suicide), up until the juddering refrain of ‘Prolix! Prolix! There’s nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix!’
Following Get Ready For Love and The Lyre of Orpheus, the night draws heavily to a close with Hard On For Love (dedicated to Cave’s mother) and bass-driven Stagger Lee. With lyrics as witty and biting as Cave’s, and textures as fierce and assured as those created by Ellis and the rest of the band, the Bad Seeds are surely, fourteen albums in, as much of a force to be reckoned with as ever before.
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