Review: Nick Cave goes wild again with his old band in riveting Minneapolis show

There were the usual tunes about midnight-dark souls and violence and unholiness, and they sure were fun to hear again. The songs that really hit hardest at Sunday night’s unrelenting Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds concert at the Armory in Minneapolis, though, were the ones about joy and love and hope.

Performing in Minnesota with his old band for the first time in 11 years — not counting a couple of unconventional solo gigs — the deep-bellowing Australian rocker and his elaborate band made up for lost time.

They didn’t bother recruiting an opening act and performed for nearly three hours. In just one of those hours, they covered more emotional and musical ground than most full concerts, veering between boisterous, soaring, crescendoing epics enhanced by a four-piece choir to more hushed, tender moments that would turn the three-quarters-full Armory close to pin-drop quiet.

As is always the case when he’s out with the Bad Seeds, Cave himself covered a lot of ground in the literal sense, too. The lanky, 67-year-old singer would frequently jump up from his grand piano to run onto a walkway that jutted out from the stage, where he would frequently get right in fans’ faces or hold their hands.

At one point early in the set during the intensely orchestrated “Conversion,” Cave marched back and forth on stage and vehemently pointed at fans over and over, loudly proclaiming the refrain to each of them:

“Stop! You are beautiful! Stop! You are beautiful!”

He sang it as if he were furious at them for thinking otherwise, too.

“Conversion” was one of eight songs in the 23-song setlist from the elegantly arranged, emotionally wracked new Bad Seeds album, “Wild God.” The record found Cave coming out the other end of a dark tunnel in which he mourned the deaths of two sons, one just 15. He truly seemed to want to bring light to the rest of the world as he ran in and out of the spotlight Sunday.

Having a gospel-tinged quartet of backup singers was just one of many ways levity and a joyful spirit balanced out the sad undercurrent in tunes like the eerily electrified show-opener “Frogs” and one of the show’s quieter highlights, “Bright Horses.”

Two of the “Wild God” tracks, “Cinnamon Horses” and “Joy,” grew from languid-at-first ballads into triumphal, hands-in-the-air musical climaxes with help from the extra singers and the Bad Seeds’ multi-instrumental approach. This is one rock band that can blend in violin, vibraphones and even timpani the way most bands simply change up guitar pedals.

Some of the older tunes that dotted the setlist were given new treatment, starting with 2004’s “O Children,” about which Cave said he picked for the tour because “here we are living in a world today that can’t take care of its children.” That was followed by an ultra-manic “Jubilee Street” and muddied, tribal-sounding “Tupelo.”

Between the heaviness of both the old and new songs, Cave managed to work in bits of light-hearted humor, too — starting with pretending he thought he was in Milwaukee, and including some biting banter with audience members.

The biggest laugh came in the encore when he picked out the murder ballad “Henry Lee” for the first time this tour and had to ask new bassist Colin Greenwood for the song’s musical key.

“Colin knows because he’s in Radiohead, and they know stuff like that,” Cave quipped.

After “Henry Lee,” all the Bad Seeds walked off stage and left Cave to finish the show by himself with a solo piano version of “Into My Arms,” a song that casts doubt on everything except the power of love. It was the lightest and simplest-sounding song in a long and very hard-hitting performance, and yet it felt like the most powerful one, too.

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Here’s the setlist from Sunday’s Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds concert at the Armory in Minneapolis:

Encore: