“My God, it’s good to see you/right here in the flesh.”
Those are the opening lines of Nickel Creek’s ambitious new Celebrants, the band’s first album together in nine years. Those lyrics hit home as St. Louis fans have been waiting years for the trio to return to town, and given the robust crowd Sunday night at the Factory, the band has only gotten more popular as fans waited for the Creek to rise again.
Mandolin genius Chris Thile, with a pair of heel-clicking leaps as he took the stage, announced that the feeling was mutual. The older members of the audience likely remember Nickel Creek when the band played the Duck Room nearly a quarter century ago as California wunderkinds in the process of reinventing progressive bluegrass, pushing the genre into expansive new directions and bringing masses of new fans to acoustic music through the band’s singular brand of complex, New Age braingrass.
At the Factory, the Creeksters reached back to those days by playing five songs from the band’s 2000 self-titled album. Yet by opening with the new “Where the Long Line Leads,” featuring some of fiddler Sara Watkins’ most scorching vocals, the band made it clear that it has plenty of new ways to astound us. That song’s hook — “We only have a short time/So make it a big one/We’re going to have a big time” — set the tone for what would be a jubilant evening.
Of course, it’s hard to take your eyes off of Thile, who wore sparkling eye jewels last night for the occasion. With thalamus-reorganizing instrumental mastery and a ferocious curiosity, Thile displayed plenty of the picaresque picking prowess, ever-innovative compositional excursions and thrilling improvisational wizardry that have made him the greatest bluegrass musician of his generation.
Thile stepped into the spotlight during the opening song to geek out on a thorny, shape-shifting solo and then stepped back in time on “Ode to a Butterfly,” the song that originally introduced Thile’s falcon-fast, feather-finessed mandolin magic to the world. Next, Thile sang lead on the stomping “When in Rome,” revealing a full recovery from his recent sinus-infection vocal loss that caused some cancellations elsewhere on the tour.
From there, it was a best-of-Nickel-Creek convoy of old and new, ballads and sizzlers, instrumentalists and vocal showcases. Guitarist Sean Watkins, whose strapping fret-play is often feloniously overlooked in the band, took over vocals on “This Side” and “Somebody More Like You,” two early fan favorites, and held forth on a “rapture” ribbing intro to gospel-grass tune “21st of May,” which contained some of Sean’s slickest flatpicking of the evening.
Even new songs held the audience in thrall, like “To the Airport,” which saw the trio harmonizing into the same microphone, and the time-signature-bending instrumental “Going Out … ” introduced by Thile as a celebration of us all successfully going out on a Sunday night: “We did it!” he shouted.
Watkins had another big moment late in the show when she went to a handheld mic, adding sweet, register-leaping vocals to “Time Will Cure Me” amid clouds of purple smoke. As a fiddler, she spent the night blending bebop, baroque and bluegrass, often within the same song, like the amazing instrumental “Elephant in the Corn,” erasing the distance between fiddle tunes and Bach partitas.
And let’s hear it also for bassist Jeff Picker, stepping into a mountainous assignment on this tour and anchoring songs like the ethereal new “Failure Isn’t Forever” and the standard “The Fox,” an old Nickel Creek barnburner. Afterward, the band said goodbye with a couple of older tunes — 2002’s winding instrumental “Smoothie Song” and the lullaby-like title cut to 2005’s Why Should the Fire Die?, wrapping up a tour-de-force comeback show. On Sunday night, we were all celebrants.
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