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Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (Australia)
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July 27, 20:00
Adrenaline Stadium 
 After three years since last concert, as part of the European tour, the brilliant multi-instrumentalist, composer, poet and writer Nick Cave will return to Russia. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds band is a long-awaited in Russia and here they come again! The band promises to come with breathtaking show, and will also present their latest album "Skeleton Tree", filled with Cave's dramatic darkness. The album was recorded under extremely sad circumstances - it was at that time that Nick Cave tragically lost his son... It will be a very emotional show that you need to see with your own eyes!
After goth pioneers the Birthday Party called it quits in 1983, singer/songwriter Nick Cave assembled the Bad Seeds, a post-punk supergroup featuring former Birthday Party guitarist Mick Harvey on drums, ex-Magazine bassist Barry Adamson, and Einstürzende Neubauten guitarist Blixa Bargeld. With the Bad Seeds, Cave continued to explore his obsessions with religion, death, love, America, and violence with a bizarre, sometimes self-consciously eclectic hybrid of blues, gospel, rock, and arty post-punk, although in a more subdued fashion than his work with the Birthday Party. Cave also allowed his literary aspirations to come to the forefront; the lyrics are narrative prose, heavy on literary allusions and myth-making, and take some inspiration from Leonard Cohen. Cave's gloomy lyrics, dark musical arrangements, and deep baritone voice recall the albums of Scott Walker, who is also obsessed over death and love with a frightening passion. However, Cave brings a hefty amount of post-punk experimentalism to Walker's epic dark pop.
Cave released his first album with the Bad Seeds "From Her to Eternity" in 1984, which contained a noteworthy cover of Elvis Presley's "In the Ghetto," foreshadowing much of Cave's style and subject matter on the follow-up "The Firstborn Is Dead". "Kicking Against the Pricks", an all-covers album, broke the band in England with the help of "The Singer," which hit number one on the U.K. independent charts. The album also strengthened Cave's reputation as an original interpreter and a vocal stylist of note. Following 1986's Your Funeral...My Trial, Cave took a two-year hiatus from recording, partially to appear in Wim Wenders' 1987 film "Wings of Desire", and then returned with "Tender Prey", which featured Cramps guitarist Kid Congo Powers and Cave's strongest vocal performance up to that point.
Cave's productivity picked up immensely over the next two years after he kicked a heroin habit. He had two books (1988's King Ink, a collection of lyrics, plays, and prose, and 1989's And the Ass Saw the Angel, a novel) published; appeared in the 1989 Australian film "Ghosts...of the Civil Dead" as a prisoner; recorded a soundtrack to the film with Harvey and Bargeld; and released 1990's The Good Son, his most relaxed, quiet album.
Cave received his due as one of the leading figures in alternative rock when he was invited to perform on the 1994 edition of the Lollapalooza tour to promote his "Let Love In" album. Early in 1996, he released "Murder Ballads", a collection of songs about murder. "Murder Ballads" became Cave's most commercially successful album to date, and, with typical perversity, he followed it with the introspective and personal "The Boatman's Call" in early 1997. A spoken word release "Secret Life of the Love Song" followed in 1999. Two years later, a rejuvenated Cave teamed up with the Bad Seeds once again for the piano-laden "No More Shall We Part". "Nocturama" was released in 2003, and the double-album "Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus" followed by the end of 2004.
After touring in support of the album throughout 2005, Cave embarked on a new project called Grinderman with Bad Seeds members Warren Ellis, Martyn Casey, and Jim Sclavunos. The group's self-titled debut was released in 2007, the same year Cave was inducted into Australia's Aria Hall of Fame. In 2008, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds released "Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!"It was followed by a second Grinderman recordings - entitled Grinderman II, followed by a world tour and the band's breakup announced by Cave on-stage in December of 2011. Cave penned the screenplay for director John Hillcoat's 2012 bootlegging film Lawless, which also featured a score composed by Cave and Warren Ellis. The duo had previously collaborated on scores for The Proposition, The Road, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and Days of Grace.
In February of 2013, Cave and a streamlined Bad Seeds broke their five-year silence with the release of Push the Sky Away. Push the Sky Away, produced by Nick Launay, is painted with a deliberately limited sonic palette by Ellis. The album's sequencing makes it feel like a long, moody suite. While most of these songs contain simple melodies and arrangements that offer the appearance of vulnerability and tenderness, it is inside this framework that they eventually reveal their sharp fangs and malcontent.
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ sixteenth studio album Skeleton Tree began its journey in late 2014 at Retreat Studios, Brighton, with further sessions at La Frette Studios, France in autumn 2015. The album was mixed at AIR Studios, London in early 2016. "People die in Nick Cave songs. They get wiped out in floods, zapped in electric chairs, and mowed down en masse in saloon shoot-outs. For Cave, death serves as both a dramatic and rhetorical device—it’s great theater, but it’s also swift justice for those who have done wrong, be it in the eyes of a lover or the Lord. As I once heard him quip in concert: “This next one’s a morality tale… they’re all morality tales, really. It’s what I do.” But despite amassing a songbook that needs its own morgue, on their 16th album together, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds must contend with something that is not so easily depicted: the sound of mourning. In July 2015, Cave’s 15-year-old son Arthur—one of his twin sons with wife Susie Bick—died when he accidentally fell from a cliff near the family’s current home in Brighton, England. The writing and recording of Skeleton Tree had commenced before the tragic incident, but the album was completed in its aftermath, and its specter hangs over it like a black fog. This is a record that exists in the headspace and guts of someone who’s endured an unspeakable, inconsolable trauma. And though the songs are not explicitly about Arthur they are uncannily about coming to terms with loss and the realization that things will never be the same again.
If you try to listen to Skeleton Tree removed from its somber context, the album feels very much like a natural step from 2013’s Push the Sky Away, whose premium on disquieting, ambient textures and wandering-mind lyricism now seems like less like a momentary detour than the gateway into an intriguing new phase for the Bad Seeds. This great unknowing serves as the album’s guiding principle. In Cave’s wounded voice, you hear him grapple in real-time with the incidental prophecies of his lyrics and his need to get the job done. However, the darkness has at least acquired enough definition for Cave to make out a path forward. The last line Cave sings on the album is “It’s all right now,” less a declaration of closure than an acceptance it may never come" (Stuart Berman). Tickets
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