Nick Cave and Kurt Vile at The Mann Center

Aug222014August 22, 2014August 22, 20141 Commentby Beef Wellington

Nick Cave and Kurt Vile at The Mann Center 6/25/2014

Posted in Music

So I saw Kurt Vile and The Violators open for Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds at what is easily one of my favorite venues in Philly, The Mann Center. Ya ya I know it was almost a month ago at this point but…. I’m lazy and I tend to just get boozed up after work when I should be doing things like this. What can I say? This is America and it’s my god given right to blow off responsibilities to pour cheap beer down my gullet until I drift off into a mind numbing stupor and for the briefest, most blissful few moments forget the hopelessly tyrannical reality that is everyday existence (just kidding I never do that).

Anyways, going into this I didn’t know a whole lot about Nick Cave. I’d heard a few of his records and knew he was kind of a weird dude from Australia… but that was about it. To be honest I got kind of drunk at my friends house one night, bought the tickets on my iPhone and didn’t remember doing it until I saw the email from Ticketmaster about two weeks later. It was just like Christmas morning and I was a young boy once more… and I guess also Santa Claus or maybe the whiskey was Santa Claus. Whiskey made me my own Santa Claus? Either way it was awesome and I highly suggest it. But back to the topic at hand: Nick Cave blew my mind. Holy shit, I had no idea what I was in store for and to be honest I don’t really know how to describe the performance with words. They’d play a smooth jazz ballad then break into an intense, roaring rock number while Cave stalked around the stage like some kind of mythical demon made flesh. In short it was intense… very intense. For the first time in quite awhile I found myself on edge by the end of each song, eagerly waiting to see what they would do next.

Here’s what’s possibly the most intense version of Stagger Lee in existence:

I know it may sound like an afterthought at this point but Kurt Vile and The Violators were excellent as well. I probably should have written about them first but I’m not too big on editing and probably no one is still reading at this point anyways… am I right (wink, wink). Ahhh I crack myself up. But seriously, I’d only seen Kurt Vile play sans Violators before and I was quite impressed with the full line up. They ran though a nice selection of tunes from his past few albums. My only complaint was that the set was a bit short and I wanted more but that’s the plight of the opening act.