POP MUSIC REVIEW : An Illuminating Flash Caps Cave’s Concert Vision

Lots of musicians examine rock’s roots. Nick Cave likes to pull them up and see what crawls out from underneath.

In the astonishing encore of his Wiltern Theatre concert on Friday, the underground rock hero nailed a couple of old Leadbelly field hollers and work songs to the cross of his own vision while his band, the Bad Seeds, slapped out jumping, percussive patterns behind him.

From there it was a short jump to “Tupelo,” a Nativity story with Elvis in the central role--a swollen, hallucinatory adaptation of a John Lee Hooker blues whose warnings of stormy retribution carried the weight of biblical prophesies.

In that one extended sequence, Cave concentrated a major slice of American culture and a host of his personal obsessions into a radiant, power-packed vision.

While the body of the concert wasn’t as consistently memorable, the boldness and ambition of that closing segment showed why the tortured, 33-year-old Australian is a rising star in subterranean rock.

The surfacing that’s signified by his move from clubs to the posh and relatively large Wiltern might be accounted for in part by natural growth, and maybe in part by the less abrasive nature and more “professional” sound of his latest album, “The Good Son.”

Cave, looking like a bad boy dressed up for church in his gray suit, opened the concert strong: In “The Mercy Seat,” a condemned prisoner spills his soul in a tumbling cataract of terse lines that build into a deluge of defiance.

He followed that with the charged-up spiritual “The Witness Song.” Cave became an inflamed evangelist for a mid-song sermon of tested faith, crouching at the lip of the stage face to face with the crowd that he had ordered up out of their seats. For a minute there it looked as if this concert might be an all-timer, going places rarely approached in a rock show.

But then Cave retreated from that brink, and while the rest of the set was unquestionably intense, it was also a little automatic. Alternating stately anthems from the new album with more frantic, blues-rooted material, Cave convincingly portrayed a soul tossed and battered by mighty forces, but he kept a safe distance from the full-blown psychodrama he had hinted at.

Maybe he wants recognition for his music instead of his eccentricities, which is fair enough. Certainly new material like the beautifully haunting “The Weeping Song” is convincing by any standard, and the more tumultuous stuff retained its visionary, punk-rooted edge.

With his deep, Elvis-like rumble, Cave is an absorbing non-singer in the vein of Leonard Cohen, and there’s a touch of parody when his Presley fixation gives rise to sweeping pop melodrama: the lounge act as Apocalypse.

Ultimately, though, Cave is a remarkable piece of self-invention, and his performance can’t be isolated from his unique and unified vision. He creates a mythological American South where madness, sin and salvation are close to the surface. The work songs, field hollers, spirituals, blues, and hymns that underlie all his music are a door to the fundamentals of the human condition, and he slices straight to their bone of dread.

L.A. singer Julie Christensen, who’s done everything from punk to cabaret, opened with a set of adult-pop showcasing her soulful vocals and maturing sensibility. Playing to just a few listeners in a set that seemed disconnected from the rest of the evening, she also showed a confident personality, delivering her material as if headlining to a full house.