Kevin Bronson on February 23rd, 2013

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By Gabriel Jones

Not a lot of magic happens anymore. So what happens when the old magicians come back to town?

Nick Cave – Tom Jones and Neil Diamond for the indie set, Johnny Cash for the heroin set, Thom Yorke for the testosterone set, part David Johansen, part Ian Curtis, looking like the feral kid from “The Road Warrior” all grown up and reasonably civilized – performed at the Fonda Theatre on Thursday with his longtime backing band the Bad Seeds, as well as a string ensemble and a children’s chorus from the Silverlake Conservatory of Music. And Cave showed he’s still got some of the old black magic in him.

• ||| Photos by Laurie Scavo

The show, his only concert in North America with additional ensemble and chorus, seemed primarily to serve as a live performance for a documentary that was being filmed – a good chunk of floor space was taken up by a massive camera crane. The evening’s opening act was even a clip from the documentary-in-progress, showing the making of the band’s new album, “Push the Sky Away,” with the usual noodling, joking and pontificating common to making-of documentaries. The first half of the concert featured the entire album performed in order.

Cave himself has long resided in ambiguity – even the appearance of the children’s chorus suggested both Cave as charming family man (“Aren’t they cute? Hi kids!”) and pied piper, and the terrain of “Push the Sky Away” is both familiar and strange, populated by Hannah Montana, Wikipedia, text-speak (“We No Who U R”) and the Higgs boson. There, too, are gods and devils and mermaids, using the language of dreams to render this new world uncanny, as if Cave has found himself grown up and old in a place where things can be recognized but not connected.

The image of mermaids and sirens haunts the album, promising both hope and abandon (“We go down with the dew in the morning light” and “the mermaids hung themselves out on the rocks, out beyond our touch / I watch and watch and they wave at me, wave at me / they wave and slip back into the sea”). He borrows from Gwendolyn Brooks with “We Real Cool,” singing from the other side of youth about the cliffs we’re headed towards.

Love, it seems, mostly comes with an awareness of the debts we end up paying forever after. The one exception is the soft, slowly stirring “Wide Lovely Eyes,” which Cave dedicated in the show to his wife, Susie (but even then: “they’ve hung the mermaids from the streetlights by their hair”). (Incidentally, after Cave’s dedication to his wife, an audience member shouted “If she married you, god bless her,” to which Cave replied ”“ “Jesus, you Americans are weird.”). And by the next song, “Water’s Edge,” he warbles almost gleefully both on album and in concert, “Ah, but the chill of love is coming on.”

This is the sound of goth and post-punk grown old – not so much weary or defeated, but perhaps taking entirely seriously the looming threat of age, death and obsolescence, as well as the debts we accrue from the thrills we seek. The burnt apocalyptic landscape of the opener, “We No Who U R,” is already stark enough in its recorded version but was rendered even darker and more dangerous in Thursday’s performance, the chilling piano line turned into a tightly wound drum, Cave’s voice deep and low and foreboding.

Fans used to Cave’s normally explosive energetic performances had to settle, at least for the first half of the show, for only fits and starts; the contemplative, brooding menace of the new album has Cave more often prowling the stage like a caged tiger or prophesying like a preacher in a tent revival. By the crescendo of “Jubilee Street,” the album’s centerpiece, he allowed himself to get carried away for a few moments, the audience ululating (no, seriously, they really were – it was that kind of audience) with delight at the momentary reappearance of the old manic demon, but he was soon back to the apocalyptic street preacher murmuring of end-times with “Mermaids” and “We Real Cool.”

As a sign of things soon to come, however, multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis, looking every bit the mad wizard himself, also returned to the old Bad Seeds form by closing the “Push the Sky Away” set with his frantic wild mock-conducting of the children’s chorus as the whole stage hypnotically sang over and over “You’ve got to just keep on pushing it, keep on pushing it, push the sky away.”

Then it was back to the old electricity. The crowd, which seemed as if were waiting patiently for the first half of the show like dogs told to sit and stay, burst alive when the band pulled out its old favorites – “From Her to Eternity,” “Red Right Hand,” and later, a frantic, terrifying “Jack the Ripper” – releasing all the energy that had been pent up during the more introspective first set . The audience, it would seem, is not quite ready yet to grow older with Cave. And the most savage performance of the evening was saved for the encore, “Stagger Lee,” with its unprintable lyrics and raw, demonic force, sending all the vampires recharged back out into the Hollywood night.