Nick Cave is a Metal God

Nick Cave is an honorary metal artist. Indie purists may scoff at the thought, but his badass attitude, theatrical performances, and much of his music are more metal than most of what you'd see on Headbanger's Ball. It is no wonder he's so revered in the metal community.


Like Johnny Cash or Tom Waits, the energy that Nick Cave brings to his music strikes a chord with music devotees who like their music dark, aggressive and hard-boiled. Intentionally or not, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' influence can be seen a slew of metal artists, from the violent, spontaneous stage shows of the Dillinger Escape Plan to Slipknot's employment of multiple percussionists to Dave Mustaine's talk/scream vocals. Countless noise rockers (including Cave's newest band, Grinderman) are indebted to his work with the Birthday Party, and as with most great metal acts, Cave emits a perfect blend of bleakness and campiness. Metallica's cover of 'Loverman' is not Hetfield & co.'s finest moment, but it makes a good case that the biggest metal band of all time (who also collaborated with Cave's cohort, Marianne Faithfull) has more in common with Nick Cave than bands like Iron Maiden or KISS.

Another metal aspect of Nick Cave is that his live performances are relentlessly captivating and over the top. His only US performance this year, a March 6 date at Terminal 5, overcame the venue's heinously stifling acoustics and the performance's slot at this year's Plug Awards (an indie music-based, somehow even less relevant version of the grammys) to be one of the best recent NYC-area shows in memory.

Dressed to the nines and sporting a fu manchu, Cave kicked off the evening with the verbose title track of his new album with the Bad Seeds, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!. Cave spliced the track's catchy, blunt chorus with bizarre, long-winded monologues that re-imagined the Bible parable as a Re-Animator-era horror story. "I mean, he never asked to be raised from the tomb," mugged Cave, recalling both a deranged preacher and a camp-fire storyteller. "No one ever actually asked him to forsake his dreams!" Scary, goofy, epic and biblical, it may be as close to the definitive sound of Nick Cave as he's come thus far, and the piping church organ, restless percussion and background chants provided by the Bad Seeds overwhelmed the venue's usual echo flawlessly.


The Bad Seeds are as muscular as any backup band this side of Crazy Horse, and it would take a frontman of Cave's caliber to not get buried by the wall of percussion provided by Jim Sclavunos and Thomas Wydler, or the heavily distorted guitars and keyboards that Mick Harvey, James Johnston and Cave himself alternated between. The Bad Seeds are unquestionably one of the greatest-sounding bands in rock, enhancing Cave's compositions with creaky old organs, violent-sounding fiddles and enough sources of percussion to make the listener dizzy. The band also howled, chanted and raved along with Cave, and the vocalist's fierce tales of depravity contrasted seamlessly with the Bad Seeds' precision and stoicism.

As proven on his last two studio albums, the 2-disc Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus and the Grinderman side project, Cave's songwriting is as strong as it's ever been, and Dig, Lazarus, Dig!! is no exception. Most of the set focused on new material, including the instant 'Lie Down Here (and Be My Girl),' the haunting, bare-bones 'Night of the Lotus Eaters' and the purely mesmerizing 'Albert Goes West.' 'We Call Upon the Author to Explain' offered a brilliant, VU-resembling organ riff and abrupt interlude to complement Cave's stream-of-consciousness discourse, which played somewhat like an evil twin to his earlier 'There She Goes, My Beautiful World.' Not to ignore the 'hits,' Cave dug out the cinematic 'Red Right Hand' and a particularly forceful 'Tupelo,' Cave's nightmarish tribute the King and his stillborn brother Jesse.

Ending his first set with his '90s update of 'Stagger Lee,' Cave engaged the crowd while acting out the song's characters as he described them. Depicting murders as harrowing/cartoonish as anything conceived by the Wu-Tang Clan, Cave flailed his arms and legs and seemed on the verge of killing people in the front row. Other than Iggy Pop, no elder statesman of rock is so frightfully animated, and the sight of one of music's most literary, poetic figures frothing at the mouth is one that no music fan should pass on.

Encoring with the subtly moving 'More News from Nowhere,' Cave and the Bad Seeds successfully calmed the mood before sending us on our way. "It's getting strange in here," crooned Cave, master of the understatement. "It gets stranger every year." There's really nothing normal about a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds show, and really no reason why you should miss a chance to see them.