Bright Countenance Illuminates Some of Cave’s Darker Recesses

“I don’t do happy. I do angry and I do sad,” Nick Cave told his audience early in his Wiltern Theatre concert Sunday, rejecting a request for something out of character. As if many in the devoted crowd needed reminding that Cave is rock’s premier auteur of obsession and despair.

Actually, maybe a little reminder was in order. It’s been five years since Cave’s last album of new material, “The Boatman’s Call,” and with a new one due soon the singer is doing a few U.S. shows. Instead of a big-deal album launch, it’s a low-key visit with a small combo--drummer Jim White and violinist Warren Ellis, both of the Australian band Dirty Three, and bassist Susan Stenger. (The big-deal tour this fall will be with his regular band, the Bad Seeds.)

The result was an intimate, casual retrospective of the Cave oeuvre, with the singer contrasting the sometimes dire material with a relatively amused, outgoing manner. Sort of like a cabaret act at a mortuary. The instrumentation favored the funereal rather than the fevered, though “The Mercy Seat” (which Johnny Cash recorded on his latest album) worked up a heavy froth, and his “Stagger Lee” assumed epic scale.

Cave previewed a bit of the new album, “No More Shall We Part,” getting big laughs and applause for “God Is in the House,” a hymn-like skewering of small-town piety. And Cave introduced “Love Letter” by explaining that the lyric really was a love letter aimed at getting the girl. “And it worked,” he added, suggesting that even noir icons need a little romance.