Live from KCRW
This stirring live performance in front of an attentive Santa Monica audience at Apogee Studios for KCRW was originally appended to the deluxe edition of Nick Cave’s excellent 2013 album *Push the Sky Away*. Such a performance, however, deserves its own spotlight, and this standalone release should bring it the attention it deserves. Cave’s a blistering performer who can channel a voodoo priest bringing the Southern Gothic to your town, but on *Live from KCRW* he works with restraint. His singing has improved remarkably over the years; where his crooning was once tonally suspect, it\'s now confident and dead-on, such that “Far from Me” and the landmark “The Mercy Seat” are both delivered with a sensitivity that’s chilling. Warren Ellis’ violin is often the special sauce that brings the sound into the next dimension, but it certainly helps that Cave is touring his best album in a few years.
Live From KCRW was recorded last April during the week separating the Bad Seeds’ two appearances at Coachella before a small studio audience at the station’s famed Santa Monica studios. The Bad Seeds discography is hardly lacking for concert documents, but this something of a wild card among them.
Those who like their Bad Seeds really bad may bicker with the tracklisting, but it's proof that Cave can be at his most powerful when at his most soulful.
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Recorded in LA for radio station KCRW earlier this year, this fourth Cave live set splices selections from recent studio album Push the Sky Away with choice cuts from the back catalogue. The Bad Seeds have been doing this long enough now, they’re probably at the stage where they could ape Elvis Costello’s Spectacular Spinning Songbook and let fate decree the setlist, so it’s a little disappointing that some of those older choices play a little safe.
The trouble with studio albums is they don't always capture the essence of a band in the flesh. In the case of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds it's a point that's amplified by their blistering outings in support of album number 15, Push the Sky Away.
Live albums by Nick Cave and masked fusioneers Goat are notable for their lack of seasonal cheer, writes <strong>Kitty Empire</strong>
[xrr rating=4.0/5]Romantic dread is a uniting trope in the Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds oeuvre, but rarely have their live albums seen that concept so deftly realized into a palpable atmosphere as on Live From KCRW.