Nick Cave is a difficult beast to explain to the profane. He has switched his song topics enough to not really be classified as one specific type of writer. My favourite record of his is Murder Ballads, which consists of, of course, songs about murders. He's mostly into a darker style of songwriting, I'll start there.
On his slower, more orchestral songs, he can be like Hell's equivalent of Tito Puente's Big Band, with dark topics, with some references to the underworld, crime, satanism, things that crawl into dark places in the night. His harder songs are like if Bruce Springsteen's band had balls. And then there are the soft songs, which sound like a Burt Bacharach character is about to kill a zombie. His baritone could scare Depeche Mode back to the gay bars of London.
Then you see him live. They're all wearing suits. Not matching suits, they're not attending a wedding, just nice suits. To show they care. To make us think they're the Mob. Or undertakers. They make nice suits look grim. They all have long hair, albeit receding and with patches of baldness, but at their age, nothing could be more normal. Except they don't really look normal, either.
The show started off softly, with Hold On to Yourself. But then the show kicked in with a harder track and off we went. Highlights were, of course, Red Right Hand, Weeping Song and Stagger Lee. A (more) complete account of the evening's proceedings can be found here. I would have taken another song from Murder Ballads, at least, maybe The Curse of Millhaven or O'Malley's Bar, and thought after the first encore that, at 16 songs in total, it was a short one. He'd usually do 20 on this tour; other bands I like (step right up, Pearl Jam) often go to 25, sometimes even 30. But the Cave-man had a second encore in store for us, a long while after the first one had ended. An actual encore, where the artists has to come back because the crowd just won't leave. A good night indeed.
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