It’s been fun having Nick Cave kicking around the Radio Milwaukee atmosphere these last couple months. There was the premier of his new album’s title track back in March, an extended interview with NPR just a couple weeks ago, and now news that the Aussie artist will bring the Bad Seeds to Milwaukee’s Miller High Life Theatre on April 30.
The stop is part of the group’s “Wild God Tour,” named after the new record that came out in the dying embers of August. It’ll be the first time Cave and company have performed in North America since 2018, although they did have a series of shows on the books in 2020 before the pandemic scuttled those plans.
Wild God has garnered a universally positive response from critics, with Pitchfork’s Stuart Berman accurately pointing out that “if Cave’s past decade has presented us with two parallel narratives — the crowd-pleasing showman vs. the tireless experimentalist — with Wild God, he conjures their point of intersection.”
It’s a shift from Cave’s last two albums, both of which saw him understandably wrestling with the loss of his son Arthur, who died in a 2015 accident. There’s more lightness and grandiosity on Wild God, not least of all on the title track we likened to “a ship cruising on calm and then very suddenly not-calm-at-all seas.”
Those contrasting sounds will be fascinating to experience live, particularly in a similarly grand venue like the Miller High Life Theatre. It’s easy to imagine Cave and his crew bossing the joint while pulling from new and classic material alike. If you want to see that in person, there’s an eMember presale at noon this Thursday, Sept. 12 (password: WILDGOD), followed by access to the general public at 10 a.m. the following day online and at the Pabst/Riverside box offices.
