Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
Live God
BAD SEED/PIAS
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ new concert album Live God is a striking time capsule of a veteran rock group in complete control as a touring unit during their 2024 and 2025 global “Wild Gold Tour.” At over 25 tracks, Live God bottles up the wild revelry of those memorable gigs, which Cave describes as “an antidote to despair.” Live albums from any band are rarely transcendent, but this setlist balances songs from 2024’s Wild God against mythologized favorites from the band’s 40 years together, ultimately avoiding coming across as inessential or pedestrian in the process.
The tragic undercurrents beneath Cave’s recent career renaissance on both his eloquent The Red Hand Files newsletter and his band’s last three haunting studio albums (including 2019’s Ghosteen and 2016’s Skeleton Tree) are the deaths of his teenage son, Arthur, in 2015 and of his eldest child, Jethro, in 2022. Cave and the Bad Seeds crystallized their spiritual rock journey with their 2024 tour supporting Wild God by cutting rock stadium bombast with gospel reverence as true frontman power is shot through with vulnerability. The concept of wrestling joy from the jaws of grief was a throughline for Wild God; on its recorded live version, “Joy” bottles up the delirium one feels after traveling through the initial blunt-force traumas from bereavement and stumbling into the reckoning of each new day without certain loved ones.
It’s a feeling Cave explored last month when a fan reached out to him through his newsletter, explaining an experience of waking up racked with grief and feeling the presence of her deceased son, who reassured her that he’s happy and living on a lake in Wisconsin as a Golden Retriever. Cave responded to the woman by calling these moments “gifts that surpass understanding” in a world entwined in materialism and skepticism before going on to describe that this “thread of magic is, in fact, a truth.” Shivering after a morning dip in a nearby lake, Cave recollects patting, hugging, and talking to a Golden Retriever while in line at a coffee shop. “Perhaps what happens to one Golden Retriever happens to all Golden Retrievers—just as the way we treat one person can echo through us all.”
In a similar vein, Live God feels empowered and no longer concerned with the spiritual, nor with feelings of guilt. That’s the message of setlist opener “Frogs,” a shape-shifting orchestral-rock celebration of life’s miracles—specifically an Exodus-like storm of amphibians. Live God finds its footing early with the revelatory “Wild God,” Lyre of Orpheus’s closer “O Children,” From Her to Eternity’s title track, and the piano-led ballad “Long Dark Night.” It’s a live album that finds a tone and proper pacing early on and sticks to it. Cave and stalwart collaborator Warren Ellis capture bombast on The Firstborn Is Dead’s “Tupelo,” which reimagines the birth of Elvis Presley as a Biblical dirge, and rumble through a full-band barnburner with “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry.” Cave’s pandemic-lockdown project with Ellis gets some stage time through the rain-soaked ballad “Carnage” before the band slinks through “Red Right Hand.” And no setlist would be complete without the classic piano piece “Into My Arms.”
Between new and older songs, the center of Live God is joy. Like Cave, some of us jump up like a rabbit and fall down to our knees each morning with a halo of blues. Live God cracks open the blinds for a sliver of light to come in. It’s time for the joy of music to buoy us in a roiling sea of grief and uncertainty.
