Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds played Barclays Center – 10/26

Australian auteur Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds played Brooklyn’s basketball arena before Halloween, in what I’d bet good money was their largest-ever U.S. gig. 

I always associate Nick Cave with Thanksgiving, though it’s a holiday that ultimately has…very little to do with him. There’s a certain autumnal quality to his music, I suppose, that always puts it in heavier rotation this time of year. The lurid ghoulishness of Murder Ballads and imposing menace of Let Love In or From Her to Eternity suit Halloween, of course, but the melancholy of No More Shall We Part or The Good Son are there to greet you as the November chill sets in, ferrying you towards the holidays and the grim grip of winter. I also think back to that one Thanksgiving when I was getting into Grinderman 2, listening to it in my parents’ basement while watching The Godfather on mute.

At any rate, Cave returned to the East Coast just in time for the season on the 26th of October, filling a sizable chunk of the Barclays Center in the twilight of the Bad Seeds tour behind 2016’s Skeleton Tree. The evening was classic Cave – the work of a singular showman operating at the top of this game (and not dissimilar to a show I covered in greater detail for Vanyaland last summer).

In a rare occurrence, I attended as an un-credentialed fan, left to my own devices with only a Sony DSC-HX80 point-and-shoot in the general admission crowd. Not a great camera for this sort of thing – which has me on the hunt for a better something that’ll fit in my pocket – but getting some no-pressure shots across a whole Nick Cave set was actually kind of liberating. I think this is how normal people enjoy concerts?

Check out a few impressions – including openers Cigarettes After Sex, whose record I’ve not been able to stop listening to these past couple months – below.