Nick Cave’s Laments Still Prove to Be Enthralling

It seems probable that most people going to see Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds at the Wiltern Theatre on Tuesday knew exactly what they were going to get. There were tormented dirges, relieved by the occasional rueful lament. There was Cave, the lanky Australian, delivering fire and brimstone with a fury that would take Elmer Gantry aback. It was essentially what Cave has been doing since forming this band nearly 20 years ago. And yet at the end of the evening--the first of two nights at the Wiltern for Cave--the wild applause that brought the musicians back for an apparently unplanned second encore was justified. As predictable as the concert was, it was frequently enthralling.

Touring with the Seeds for the first time since 1998, Cave made the most of the backing, guiding the band (featuring longtime Seeds guitarists Blixa Bargeld and Mick Harvey, with Dirty Three violinist Warren Ellis now also on board) through several cycles of dark marches, sorrowful ballads and manic peaks. There’s no better setting for the thorny roses of his vivid Gothic narratives--Yeats pulled through Flannery O’Connor.

Songs from last year’s “No More Shall We Part,” though of an emotional piece with the rest of his canon, expand and refine the formula, tempering the spiritual despair with an at least nominal belief in love.

But it’s something of a tease: With “Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow,” he attacked the smothering evil of naive goodness, and in “God Is In the House,” a lilting piano ballad, he mocked the hypocrisy of false piety, his voice barbed with sarcastic bile. And with the new album’s title song, which closed the regular set following “The Mercy Seat,” his signature first-person tale of a defiant murderer in the electric chair, even death did not provide release.

Perhaps someday Cave will reveal amid the death and depression a way to redemption. He didn’t Tuesday, really. But it will be worth coming back to find out if he ever does.