There is no other word to describe the aptly named Bad Seeds: they are, to a man, seedy. All seven of them — stiff-backed and loose-fingered, with greasy, unkempt hair falling into grim faces, cheap suit jackets rumpled and wrinkling, shirt collars open at the neck — look as if they’d just played an exhausting gig elsewhere and were ready for a nightcap. In quiet moments they perform with a stoic, bruised elegance; when the fever grips them, they build to a hot, sadistically concussive throb. At their head is tall, gangly Nick Cave, a black-haired scarecrow in a moss-green velvet jacket and smartly tailored trousers who balances precariously on limbs that, like many of his lyrics, seem to taper off to sharp, pointed ends. The set’s lacerating centerpieces — the creeping tabloid fugue "Red Right Hand," with its climactic cannon-like percussion battery; the sweeping, cacophonous death-house confession "The Mercy Seat," which builds to a hysteric, gasping fit — haven’t changed in several visits. But even if you knew what was coming, the performance given by Cave a week ago Wednesday at the Orpheum was still surprising in both its vehemence and its delicacy.
There was plenty of new material this time, all of it drawn from last year’s No More Shall We Part. And if the show felt of a piece with Cave’s visits in years past, that’s probably because the new disc has some of his finest songs since ’94’s Let Love In (all his discs are on Mute/Sire). "Oh My Lord" and "Fifty Feet of Pure White Snow" renewed his penchant for tent-revival evangelical wrath. Behind him, violinist Warren Ellis crouched with his instrument held upside down over his head, as if shaking it for spare change; and expressionless guitarist Blixa Bargeld, a marvel of tactical restraint until he decides to go completely bonkers, showered the audience in sheets of grinding feedback.
As late as 1996’s Murder Ballads, the mention of love in a Nick Cave song was another sure sign that some unspeakably hideous tragedy lay just up the road. Desire prefaced retribution, pure and simple. Not that that sort of thing doesn’t still go on in Nick Cave songs. It does. But on "Into My Arms" (from 1997’s The Boatman’s Call) and the new "Love Letter" and "And No More Shall We Part" — all done at the set’s end or among the encores — Cave sat at the piano and delivered heartfelt devotional ballads with no bloodshed in sight. In the midst of these he came back out with the Bad Seeds and performed a scathing version of 1984’s "Saint Huck," a wild gashing monologue — part Twain, part Faulkner, part Elvis — with a wordless moaning chorus like a dying crow. And if this one was a reminder of his willingness to play the martyr, the ballads established his willingness to play the humble yet wary parishioner, attuned as keenly to God’s simple graces as to His holy fury.
