(Bad Seeds Ltd); (Rocket)
"And I hear stories from a chamber/ How Christ was born into a manger/ And like some ragged stranger/ Died upon the cross/ And might I say, it seems so fitting in its way/ He was a carpenter by trade/ Or at least, that's what I'm told." So runs *Nick Cave*'s take on the Christian fable, recounted once again on a recent live version of the Bad Seeds' 1988 classic, The Mercy Seat. On Live from KCRW, Cave intones the words calmly, wryly, almost unburdened of the brimstone of old. Cave's narrator is about to be put to death himself, but 25 years on seems considerably more resolved about things. The song's emotional flutters are exported into Warren Ellis's elegant violin solos.
Rock'n'roll is not immune to the seasons. And the season it is most partial to is Christmas, when pop singer and guitar band alike willingly hitch their wagons to a twinkly star in pursuit of good cheer and sales. For those in need of an antidote to a certain tinsel-swaddled infant, Cave is your man, his gifts rivalling those of St Nick.
This fourth Bad Seeds live album isn't some rip-snorting gallop through perdition, setting Grinch-ish fire to fir trees (although the closing track, Jack the Ripper – "Hammer it, Jim!" – does provide some bacchanal). It's a classy, dialled-down performance in an American radio studio around the time of this year's Coachella festival. The fantastic cover shot finds Cave sitting around tons of flight-cased equipment that you can barely hear.
The governing vibe takes its cue from the most recent Cave/Seeds opus, this year's excellent Push the Sky Away, No 1 in eight countries, an album on which the loops and washes of the Dirty Three's Warren Ellis create space and nuance where guitarists such as Mick Harvey and Blixa Bargeld used to rampage. Four cuts feature from Push. Best of all is the rambling (in the sense of wandering far) Higgs Boson Blues, a meditation on matters temporal (Miley Cyrus, among others), which is even more spacious here than on the album.
The chief draw on Wide Lovely Eyes is not, meanwhile, Cave's lyric, but the malfunction rhythm of the loop beneath, and its interplay with piano and Cave's vocal melody. When all around is alcohol-fuelled bonhomie, Live from KCRW also contains a timely reminder of back-stabbings at office parties and how marital love often cannot last out the holidays: People Ain't No Good.
Recent research has suggested that Stonehenge lines up with the shortest day, not the longest, as believed by modern pagans. So if it is a party that's required, *Goat* – the totem animal of yet another Nick, Old Nick – come highly recommended. This band's 2012 debut, World Music, was a widely acclaimed riot of masks, drones, African cadences, psych-jazz and Swedish know-how. With a new album in the works, reportedly due out late next year, this live recording captures a gig – sorry, ritual – in London last summer, in which the tracks from their debut were reordered, lengthened and extemporised upon a bit. Recently, Goat's Christian Johansson told an interviewer about how psychedelia plays on the human need for "spirituality and mind-expanding music, as a reaction to our materialistic and individualistic world". At this time of year, that's something potent to mull.
Rating: 3/5
Reported by guardian.co.uk 2 hours ago.