As a showcase for his life’s work, Idiot Prayer is extraordinary, breathtakingly varied within its minimal format, and compelling throughout.
For all the elaborate staging and the high-end production, it is Cave’s commanding presence as a performer that compels. Throughout, his extraordinarily expressive face is a measure of his immersion in these old and new songs.
Stripped of the Bad Seeds and rooted to a glossy grand piano, Cave gracefully and purposefully rolls through his back catalogue ... The performance of a lifetime.
Ultimately ... Cave stands up and walks away and we all click off. Idiot Prayer is over, and it is beautiful, but in the way of an object to admire from the outside because it’s too polished to crack open and crawl inside.
Perhaps it’s a sign of the times, but there is something undeniably beautiful that one of rock’s darkest artists has become one of its most hopeful symbols of endurance, and as such Idiot Prayer remains arguably the highlight of a year’s worth of frantic attempts by artists to make the best of an awful situation.
If you were ever hoping to examine the singing Cave up-close, Alexandra Palace offers ample room and space for dissection. Far from a “hits” package made skeletal, Idiot Prayer is a soft-skinned, tenderly rendered primer on Cave as a poet and pianist in still life.
A demonstration of the power of stripped-back simplicity on Idiot Prayer: Nick Cave Alone at Alexandra Palace.
Kudos ... go out to Cave for daring to find new ways of performing and entertaining us with a distinctive and eclectic perspective on some compelling music.
This version of Nick Cave has almost become familiar for listeners, especially those who have just started discovering him within the last decade like myself. Cave and the Bad Seeds have progressively become far more intimate and emotionally charged since their 2013 album Push the Sky Away. This closeness was intensified by the death of Cave's son. That event led to the release of the groups last two albums, Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen, which continued to reveal more layers to Cave as a ... read more
The past decade has been a much more reflective and sombre musical path for master singer/songwriter Nick Cave, from film score work with Warren Ellis, a meta documentary film, to a trilogy of downbeat, melancholic and increasingly skeletal albums with The Bad Seeds, Push The Sky Away, Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen respectively. With each of these albums it has felt like layers of Cave’s sound have been peeling away leaving the bare bones of an artist and musician on display. This fitting ... read more
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