Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds live up to expectations with new album

With a new live album, the once-wild Australian rock ‘n’ roll provocateurs Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds demonstrate a new-found sense of contentment, writes John Robinson.

Nick Cave has led his band, The Bad Seeds, through three decades of personal enigma, funereal dress sense and surprising sensitivity – the culmination of which is captured on the new album Live from KShow more

As much as a gang needs its leader, that leader undoubtedly still needs his gang. For nearly 30 years, Nick Cave’s gang has been the Bad Seeds: musicians of personal enigma, funereal dress sense and a surprising sensitivity. The faces occasionally change; their lupine aspect does not. You get the impression that individual Bad Seeds have often been selected to work with the Australian songwriter more for their sympathetically dark character than necessarily for their musical accomplishment.

Strangely, perhaps, that has proved to be a sensible hiring policy, these half-dozen or so gaunt men in open-necked shirts in that time turning their hands to music that has evolved from savagery to romance and, now, somewhere beyond. The Bad Seeds have helped Cave (then a fairly deranged figure) make Faulknerian rock ‘n’ roll, filled with maniacal laughter, desperate longings and old-time religion. His 1988 song The Mercy Seat recounts a death-row prisoner pondering his crimes before facing the electric chair. Equally, in recent years, they have accommodated the writer as he embraced his new-found domesticity at the start of the 2000s. There have since been songs referencing infant strollers, wisteria and Wikipedia. One has used the word ­“Frappuccino”.

The band has been his brute chorus and his laboratory. But, as with Cave’s career-highlight album The Boatman’s Call, a solemn piano work made in 1996 as Cave was about to turn 40, they have also proved able to stand by, in virtual silence. It’s about what they do – to a degree, though, it’s also about the ambience that they create just by being there.

Lately, however, the band has ceased to be Cave’s only outlet. Rather than compressing his various impulses into his output with the Bad Seeds, he has begun to spread them around. There has been a savage side-project, Grinderman, several brutal Hollywood screenplays and a series of pensive soundtrack recordings for films including The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. An observer might wonder, with all those affairs, where does that leave the marriage?

As it appears here, on the band’s Live from KCRW, strangely rejuvenated. Taped in front of a small and friendly audience at a session for a Los Angeles radio station, this is very much comfortable terrain for the Bad Seeds, who thrive on creating after-hours intimacies. This, however, is not a set (as was their 2008 set Live at the Royal Albert Hall, which was recorded in 1997) in which they milk their audience’s empathy with the ballad form. Instead, the Bad Seeds here reveal themselves to have now fully embraced the minimal and unstructured methods that they employed on their most recent album, February’s Push the Sky Away.

The approach is exemplified here by the opening song, the magnificently paced Higgs Boson Blues. Stately, and making its refrain from one of the most-debated hypotheses in atomic physics, the song finds Cave accompanied for the most part solely by the multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis on guitar, and relaying a picaresque narrative that incorporates girl-watching from a basement patio, a car trip to Geneva and the adventures of Miley Cyrus’s alter ego Hannah Montana as she “does the African Savannah”. Sombrely intoned, it captures Cave adopting one of his most enjoyable recent writing personae: man in his 50s wryly immerses himself in popular culture.

For all its apparent lack of form (Ellis plays the same riff for nine minutes), the song has an exquisitely managed mood and speaks of a band and a writer that doesn’t need to show its hand all at once. Push the Sky Away was musically a gently pulsing record, and this show sees the band displaying a similar efficiency in their work – delivering the maximum effect for the minimum possible effort.

In the same casual way, the band extends the arm of this new system around songs from across Cave’s catalogue. Far from Me, from The Boatman’s Call, draws in a song from that album’s outer reaches and makes it a showstopper, riding lazily on its tempos, as if this rendition were an entirely spontaneous outpouring. That isn’t quite the case (at one point Cave asks the crowd for requests, but concedes that they need to “arrive at a song on this very short list”). Band and crowd reach a happy compromise on Stranger Than Kindness.

A piece from 1986, the song would seem to be the work of a very different kind of Bad Seeds. In that time, this was a band of bad reputation, a collation of nationalities (Australian, British, German) gathered together like a Nato of ill health. And yet, in its ebbs and flows and its strong dramatic centre, the song now plays like an eerie intimation of the kind of band that the Bad Seeds have become.

Continuity is very much the theme here. Most of those on stage for this April 2013 broadcast (Warren Ellis; the drummer Jim Sclavunos; the bassist Martyn Casey) have been there with Cave for 20 years. The founder member Barry Adamson, playing the organ, joined again this year for the first time since 1986. Really, though, that continuity extends far deeper. The personnel and the arrangement of the music may change. The fundamentals of the song, however, will endure, whoever plays it.

Such certainly is the case with The Mercy Seat – in its original incarnation a shocking torrent of noise, but here a minimal folk ballad. As with And No More Shall We Part and the lovely People Ain’t No Good, all heard in spectacular versions here, it’s a song to which the singer’s increased age and confident baritone both add additional gravitas. The new Bad Seeds feel as if they’ve had a software upgrade – their old files now play more smoothly.

If one were looking for a subtext to this recording, then this is probably the point to start digging. These are undoubtedly fine recordings of songs from the Nick Cave catalogue. What prompts the release of a live album now (this is only their fourth in 30 years) is more about someone who is not on it than someone who is. This and Push the Sky Away are the first two Bad Seeds albums not to feature Mick Harvey. Once Cave’s school friend, he subsequently became his party whip: bandleader and musical director of these most erratic personnel. It feels as if this release is intended to draw a line under the Harvey era and carve out a new direction, as if to say: this is worth commemorating.

You can certainly see how that might be the case. With the Bad Seeds now all accomplished men of a certain age, one imagines that the need for a disciplinarian figure has diminished. Once a band of ungovernable tendencies and unwise pursuits, the Bad Seeds have become steadily more dependable, and Cave has refined his art to the point where writing a classic ballad, a dream for most artists, has for him become a cliché to avoid.

A position for which Cave always has an opening, therefore, is a sparring partner; someone to kick his work into an unexpected direction. For the band’s first 20 years, it was Blixa Bargeld, a German guitarist who could make his instrument sound “like a dying horse”. Today, it’s Ellis: a man with the accomplishment to wring every last tear from Cave’s ballads on the violin, but equally someone who can use any stringed instrument to unleash demented noise, looping the result on his MacBook.

Both sides of Ellis are heard in full effect here: raining down a terrifying din on the closing Jack the Ripper, but also looping sympathetically on Wide Lovely Eyes from the new album. It’s on that album’s title track Push the Sky Away, however, that the power of the new Bad Seeds fully reveals itself. A song of barometric high pressure, it feels like a classic ballad, but also a modern one: “Some people say that it’s just rock ‘n’ roll,” Cave sings from amid a calming electronic vapour. “Ah, but it gets you right down to your soul.”

For a while, the fate of Nick Cave’s soul and of his rock ‘n’ roll seemed completely intertwined – the pair walking a tightrope between high achievement and reckless endangerment. Though Cave’s soul now radiates contentment, the Bad Seeds continue to provide him with the best kind of rock ‘n’ roll. It’s an environment for experimentation, where any kind of adventure is possible.

John Robinson is associate editor of Uncut and the Guardian Guide’s rock critic. He lives in London.