Review: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Vector Arena

Nick Cave. Photo/Supplied

Nick Cave will score the apocalypse.

It's been 32 years since his first album with the Bad Seeds, and the group has been both dragging rock music forward into a new sound and down into a pit of darkness by the scruff of its neck. Sixteen studio albums in and at 57 years of age, Cave still sits firmly atop his throne as rock's Prince of Darkness.

(Disclaimer: Cave had recorded nine albums with the Bad Seeds before I could even utter "Best New Music".)

Touring for his latest album, the more ambient, pitch-black dissonance of Skeleton Tree, I was expecting a more subdued affair.

Instead, as I walked into a motley Vector Arena (four songs late), I was met with the primal scream of a rollicking, ferocious account of the 1984 track From Her to Eternity, followed by 1985's punchy Tupelo.

Cave threw his gangly frame around the stage with the energy of a much younger man, his raw vocals loose and his limbs jerking any which way, looking like a possessed preacher in his dark suit and jet black hair.

A four-song stretch of The Ship Song and Into My Arms, and a devastatingly bleak back-to-back Girl in Amber and I Need You off Skeleton Tree, followed. Cave's normally booming baritone was instead cracked and frail as he chokingly repeated 'nothing really matters', and 'don't touch me' for what felt like minutes on end.

Between tracks, Cave was (thankfully) light, and filled gaps with his dry wit and breezy back and forth with the crowd. While playing the piano intro to People Ain't No Good, a yell was heard from the crowd: "People ain't no f***ing good!" Immediately he stopped playing: "Oh that's a bit severe," he deadpanned.

Cave ended the initial set with two final Skeleton Tree songs, the title track and Distant Sky. The latter features crushing lyrics which reduces the album into a few lines - words that were likely once ominous, and became eerily prescient after the death of Cave's son in 2015:

'They told us our dreams would outlive us,
They told us our gods would outlive us,
But they lied.'

The encore was loose, brutal and rabid. The Bad Seeds' pulverised Jack the Ripper, and the stand out performance of the evening, Stagger Lee - during which Cave oozed rock star, standing on the crowd barrier belting out the murder ballad to those in front of him, while simultaneously shaking the arena - before a fitting finale in Push the Sky Away.

Cave is one the great voices in rock music, his music a marriage of consistency yet total abandon for convention. Death, love and loss will continue to knock, and Cave will continue to bring them to life, for eternity.