Concert Review: Nick Cave at ACL Live: master songwriter and performer offered an intimate evening accompanied only by piano and bass.
Nick Cave has earned a reputation as a thorny character, a gloomy fellow adorned in black, crooning nihilistic lyrics of hell and damnation. He’s most often accompanied by his backing band The Bad Seeds, who lend his song craft an apocalyptic accompaniment.
Last night, however, he offered the audience at Austin’s ACL Live at the Moody Theater something different- an intimate, warm hearted performance featuring him at the piano, the only other musician onstage being Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood.
The show’s performance centered on two important focal points: one, that Cave’s voice is so sonorous, powerful. and nimble, that it can stand unadorned, and two, his lyrical content is equal parts fire and brimstone/yearning romantic.
“I know this place,” Cave stated upon taking the stage, recalling his performance at the Moody Theater back in 2019, while telling the crowd that this intimate setting required concentration from both himself, and the audience, before realizing that sounded pompous: “that sounds too much like homework, doesn’t it?”
Instead, Cave took fans through the high points of his formidable discography, opening with the haunting Girl in Amber off his 2016 album Skeleton Tree, before segueing into the Miley Cyrus-referencing fever dream Higgs Boson Blues off 2013’s Push The Sky Away. He also performed that title track, an icy wash of existential dread that held the audience in his spell.
His vocals often brought goosebumps, as on the deeply emotive O’Children, the plaintive Waiting For You, and Black Hair, which Cave described as a “mantra,” where the narrator desperately tries to reconjure a lover who has long since left his side.
Into My Arms was a true showstopper, showing Cave at his most lovelorn, while he indulged his more feral, carnal side on Mermaid’s Song and the careening, disorienting, Jubilee Street.
He offered wry asides throughout the set, noting that when he introduced Euthanasia to the band– “they didn’t like it, maybe it was the title,”
He also admitted to singing the debauched, violent Papa Won’t Leave You Henry to his son as a baby, noting that he had to pay for the child’s therapy later, but it kept him asleep at the time.
The set was hallmarked by a cinematic, piano-key-pounding rendition of his classic The Mercy Seat, a song told from the perspective of a prisoner strapped to the electric chair that sent the audience into rabid applause.
Cave came back for an encore, which he joked was generous of him, before launching into another stellar selection of songs. This included two tracks from his Grinderman project (Palaces of Montezuma and Man in The Moon).
He also paid tribute to the late Rowland S. Howard, his bandmate from The Boys Next Door, performing a stirring rendition of Howard’s composition Shivers, and a moving cover of T. Rex’s Cosmic Dancer, featuring a tasteful bass solo from Greenwood.
Cave ended with the uneasy meditation of People Ain’t No Good, a wonderful closer that saw him ruminating on whether the song’s title is apt or an overreaction:
It ain’t that in their hearts they’re bad
They’ll stick by you if they could
Ah, but that’s just bullshit, baby
People just ain’t no good
Song title aside, the set showed Cave’s appreciation for his fans (whom he credits with saving his life after the tragedy of losing two of his children). Regardless, it was a mutual love affair between artist and audience, showcasing Cave as one of the most foremost and accomplished artists of his generation. And a sweetheart at that.
