Live from KCRW

This stirring live performance in front of an attentive Santa Monica audience at Apogee Studios for KCRW was originally appended to the deluxe edition of Nick Cave’s excellent 2013 album Push the Sky Away. Such a performance, however, deserves its own spotlight, and this standalone release should bring it the attention it deserves. Cave’s a blistering performer who can channel a voodoo priest bringing the Southern Gothic to your town, but on Live from KCRW he works with restraint. His singing has improved remarkably over the years; where his crooning was once tonally suspect, it's now confident and dead-on, such that “Far from Me” and the landmark “The Mercy Seat” are both delivered with a sensitivity that’s chilling. Warren Ellis’ violin is often the special sauce that brings the sound into the next dimension, but it certainly helps that Cave is touring his best album in a few years.