The Boys Next Door - Door, Door (1979)

Looking back, thirty-odd years later from the heights that Nick Cave’s musical projects would eventually scale, it’s more than a little tempting to see Door, Door, the debut full-length from his early band the Boys Next Door as little more than a footnote or a tentative, inauspicious start. Alternately, one might fixate on this album as a kind of mystical key that unlocks the manifold secrets of his future career. Neither approach is particularly appealing, though, and while the generally sprightly material on Door, Door bears little resemblance to Cave’s later work with either the Birthday Party or the Bad Seeds, there’s enough talent on display to make it more than simply a minor curio.

The ten songs on Door, Door are tightly wound but immediately catchy post-punk exercises that often verge on new wave. Several could be slotted in a radio playlist alongside Blondie and Devo without seeming out of place; album opener "The Nightwatchman" could almost pass for an early Elvis Costello tune. In that respect, Door, Door does come across as a tentative (albeit enthusiastic) opening gambit from a bunch of young guys trying their hand at the sounds happening around them. Despite the fact that Cave is credited with songwriting for the majority of the songs, he had yet to come into his distinctive lyrical style, and his vocal delivery felt more like a restrained pantomime than a full-throated performance. "After A Fashion" is one of the only songs that really hinted at the latent gothic power of his voice, and as such, it’s the album’s high point.

Door, Door is also notable because it only featured the band’s second guitarist Rowland Howard on the b-side, which, given his songwriting credits for three of the side’s five songs, suggests that his addition was crucial to guiding the band in the darker, wilder direction they would soon take as the Birthday Party. "Dive Position" flirts with a bit of the demented carnival atmosphere that would mark some of Cave’s later work, but the closing song "Shivers" is particularly notable for how it showed Cave to already possess at least the urge -- if not yet the fully assured skill -- to croon. But even this was only the sound of a band at the bottom edge of a soon to be explosive curve, making Door, Door the least essential pre-Bad Seeds material by far.

The Boys Next Door/The Birthday Party - The Birthday Party (1980)

This was recorded and released as the second Boys Next Door album under the title The Birthday Party, but upon the band’s relocation from Australia to London they decided to change the band name altogether. Thus, subsequent reissues of the album list it as a self-titled debut from the Birthday Party, and it can now most easily be found on the Birthday Party reissue entitled Hee Haw (which also includes the three songs from the five-song EP of the same name which did not make the album). More importantly, despite how much The Birthday Party improves on Door, Door in quite literally every aspect, the album is still only a preview of the manic brilliance that was soon to appear with the Birthday Party’s finest album.

The band’s ability to both menace and punch increased exponentially between these two early albums, even if the constituent pieces are mostly the same. Tracy Pew’s bass is more apt to snarl, and the guitars stab and quiver just as much as they jangle. Cave’s vocals have taken a huge step forward from Door, Door -- not only in his tone, but also in the confidence of his delivery, which often toys with and subverts expected rhythmic patterns (see the chorus to "Hats on Wrong" for a prime example of this). The keys and basically any other new wave trappings have been excised, leaving The Birthday Party as a gloomy, nervously twitchy, goth-leaning post-punk album. Anytime that the vestiges of that past style appear -- as on "Waving My Arms" or the somewhat Clash-like reggae of "Riddle House" -- they are swiftly buried in a far dourer atmosphere, in which every instrumental voice is a dagger honed to razor-bright sheen.

Highlights include the feedback shrapnel guitar solo of "The Hair Shirt" and the creepiness of "The Red Clock," but on the whole, the album is of a much more unified atmosphere, far gloomier than Door, Door, and quite a bit less manic than the two Birthday Party albums to follow. The true showstopper here is "The Friend Catcher," which lurches and lunges forward as Cave puts in his most committed vocal performance yet heard on record. He imitates a donkey and a train while railing about "a prison of sound," and the shrieking feedback that introduces and closes the song eventually begins imitating a freight train screaming down the rails. The Birthday Party similarly finds the band gaining steam and picking up momentum as it rides the wide plains toward greater stops somewhere further down the line.

Nocturama (2003)

Nocturama is the worst Bad Seeds album, and it’s not even a particularly close contest. In what surely must be an indication of the absurd quality of Cave’s musical output, however, Nocturama isn’t even necessarily a bad album. The biggest problem with Nocturama is that it feels uncertain, lacking a self-assured center or identity. For the most part, the arrangements look back to The Boatman’s Call, while a few moments point uneasily forward to the riotous gospel rock of Abbatoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus, but Nocturama lacks both the emotional gravity and invention of the former and the joyful outbursts of the latter.

"Wonderful Life" sets the album’s stage admirably enough, and all the players are properly blocked, but Cave’s repeated invocation of "What a wonderful life!" all the way back on Prayers On Fire’s "King Ink" feels more truthful and, ultimately, vital than it does here. That might be an unfair comparison to draw, but given how interconnected Cave’s lyrical world and songwriting often proves, it doesn’t seem totally off the mark. Too many of these songs feel like drab filler, and too many of Cave’s lyrics scan as uninspired and derivative. (Worst on both counts is "Rock Of Gibraltar.") Even when the album cranks the settings up to "rock," it pales compared to other Bad Seeds outings, with "Dead Man in My Bed" feeling like a repurposed "Jangling Jack," and "Babe, I’m On Fire," for all its delightful wordplay and far-seeing breadth, failing to justify its overlong scale and undercooked arrangement.

If I were feeling uncharitable, I might close this capsule with something along the lines of, "If I were Blixa Bargeld, I would have left after this album, too." Of course, I don’t know anything about the circumstances of his departure, and he certainly would have had a lot more to work with on the next album(s), but nevertheless, that’s the mean-spirited jab that keeps springing to mind every time I revisit this album. Nocturama feels like a placeholder or a misfire, and given the fiery sprawl that spills out of every corner of the album that follows, one can’t help but wonder if Cave and his cohorts had a similar feeling.

Your Funeral... My Trial (1986)

Your Funeral... My Trial is the first Bad Seeds album to really delight and revel in restraint. Nowhere is this clearer than one of the album’s high points, the Blixa Bargeld composition "Stranger Than Kindness," where Cave’s dour vocals weave and float, and the majority of the musical foreground is taken up by rich depths of Bargeld’s multiple guitar tracks, leaving Harvey’s drums to barely register. The album was initially recorded as two separate EPs, but the original Mute CD version combines them together and alters the track order. (The 2009 remastered and reissued version restores the song order from the original double EP format.)

As evidence of the ability of the Bad Seeds to excel at delicacy just as at savagery, Your Funeral… My Trial is interesting, but the band would later master this same skill, and as a result, much of the album feels a bit too flat, particularly compared to the dynamism of the albums that immediately surround it. The songs move pleasantly enough, and even with a sort of grace, but there’s not enough contrast to separate songs like "She Fell Away," "Jack’s Shadow," and "Your Funeral... My Trial."

Still, to give credit where it’s due, the album shows Cave improving on his ability to craft focused, parsimonious stories with his lyrics. This doesn’t mean he resorts to flat-footed plainness, though, as his lyrics retain a suggestive, poetic slant even as they bring entire worlds into being with just a few spare verses. The best evidence of all of these combined strengths is "The Carny," which is undoubtedly the album’s standout song, not just for how much at odds with the rest of the album it is, but for the delirious, perfectly evocative carnival atmosphere of its instrumentation, and the haunted terseness of its seasick waltz tempo.

Emblematic of the missed opportunity of this album is the supremely lewd "Hard On For Love." Cave’s lyrics are at lascivious, blasphemous heights (or is that depths?) not yet seen, and yet the music never quite musters the requisite heave and swagger that his reference to what one assumes is a woman’s labia thus -- "He leadeth me like a lamb to the lips/ Of the mouth of the valley of the shadow of death" -- would seem to necessitate.

Kicking Against The Pricks (1986)

Kicking Against The Pricks is still a bit of an oddity in the Bad Seeds discography. To record a full album of covers at such an early stage in the band’s career feels at first like a puzzling move, although the ease with which they handle the stylistic variety nearly makes up for that. The album is also interesting for personnel-related reasons: It’s the first Bad Seeds album to feature Thomas Wydler on drums, who remains with the band to this day (which makes him, following Mick Harvey’s departure, the longest serving member of Cave’s band). The album also features Birthday Party alumni Rowland Howard (on two songs) and Tracy Pew (on three), the latter of whom passed away later in 1986.

Musically, the album still hovers quite closely around various elaborations of the blues and other American roots music, from the snarling murder blues of John Lee Hooker’s "I’m Gonna Kill That Woman" to the ghostly country lament of "Long Black Veil," perhaps made most famous by one of Cave’s great inspirations, Johnny Cash. (That the song’s narrator is a convicted and later executed man could be seen as suggestive of the genesis of one of Cave’s highest points as a songwriter, "The Mercy Seat.") For anyone most familiar with the version made famous by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, "Hey Joe" sees the most dramatic transformation, a squalling undercurrent of sound provided by piano and guitar effects while Mick Harvey pounds a simple tom beat. The Velvet Underground classic "All Tomorrow’s Parties" gets a mostly straight reading, but with multi-tracked male vocals taking over Nico’s original, and with plenty of cacophonous guitar from both Harvey and Bargeld.

As an effective demonstration of the Bad Seeds’ interpretive strengths, and as a document of some of the musical and songwriting currents that clearly influenced Cave as a songwriter and the Bad Seeds as a musical unit, Kicking Against The Pricks is a success. Still, for all the oddball musical twists and offbeat flourishes, many of the song choices feel a bit too on-point, and the lasting impression is that, knowing what music inspired the band, the listener is sure to be more impatient to hear the band refract those influences into original compositions. A worthwhile curiosity, but among the least essential.

The Birthday Party - Junkyard (1982)

The last full-length studio album from the Birthday Party is in many ways a continuation of the shadowy yet explosive noise of Prayers On Fire. In some respects, though, it begins to show more visibly the signs of a band teetering ever close to implosion and eventual collapse. Some of its heights hit higher than Prayers On Fire, but it also suffers from more filler material, which makes it not quite the definitive Birthday Party album.

The album’s real triumphs are "Hamlet," "Big-Jesus-Trash-Can," and "Junkyard," with "She’s Hit" and "Dead Joe" hitting almost the same high bar while adding new elements to the Birthday Party’s arsenal. Phil Calvert’s freeform machine-gun drumming on "She’s Hit" is particularly striking, and "Dead Joe" finds the band reaching new heights of ferocity, with its violently modal and nearly amusical thrust. "Hamlet (Pow Pow Pow)," with its threatening bass line that seems to anticipate "Loverman" by over a decade, also shows Cave’s words stretching their muscles a bit, as he conjoins Shakespearean wordplay and 1940s American gangster imagery. "Big-Jesus-Trash-Can" is a similar stroke of demented lyrical genius, and features some of Cave’s nastiest, most lunatic vocals to date.

Elsewhere, however, several of the tracks penned completely by Rowland Howard seem to be pushing the band backward, away from damaged punk cacophony and toward the smoother, catchier post-punk of Door, Door and The Birthday Party. This tension is most noticeable on "Several Sins" and "The Dim Locator," the latter of which features lyrics (from Howard) that cross the line from surrealism into pure nonsensical wordplay. The band’s youthful overindulgences also impacted the album, and saw future Bad Seed Barry Adamson filling in on bass for a few tracks while Tracy Pew was locked up briefly for a drunk-driving offense. If on Prayers On Fire, the Birthday Party felt settled in their own unsettling skin, on Junkyard they feel slightly more awash in cross-cutting trends around them, with a few tracks feeling a bit like Joy Division, and a few others -- notably "Junkyard" -- cavemanning themselves into a mottled, no wave stomp that surely influenced Michael Gira’s Swans (who formed in 1982, the year of Junkyard’s release). All of this means that while there’s enough bile and wide-eyed chaos to place Junkyard above some of the lesser Bad Seeds outings, there’s not nearly enough accidental brilliance or half-drunk mania to match Prayers On Fire (or the final Birthday Party material, for that matter -- the Mutiny! and The Bad Seed EPs).

(Also of historical interest is the song "Release The Bats," which was released as a single (backed with "Blast Off") and then added to Junkyard on its later CD reissue. Cave’s torpid Elvis imitation, lyrics that include the lines "My baby is a cool machine, she moves to the pulse of her own generator/ She says damn that sex supreme, she says damn that horror bat/ Sex vampire, cool machine," and the song’s rockabilly swing are probably the closest that the Birthday Party ever got to actual gothic music, but it’s clearly enough of a bead to see where some of the genre’s eventual hysterical caricatures might have drawn inspiration.)

The Good Son (1990)

After whatever hellish summoning unleashed such a torrent of gruesome thoughts all over Tender Prey, it’s more than a little jarring to see the cover art of The Good Son, with several little girls in delicate dresses gathered around Nick Cave playing a grand piano. Frankly, the musical transition is more than a little jarring as well, because The Good Son is, for the first time in Cave’s career, an entire album’s worth of ballads. His lyrical themes remain dark and troubled, to be sure, but the whole album is rounded, stuffed with ornamental string accompaniment, and sees Cave singing in as close an approximation to sincerity as any devotee had yet heard in him.

This hardly means that the album is a saccharine failure. In fact, for the way in which it fully embraces its ambition to be pretty and delicate, it succeeds mightily where Your Funeral... My Trial floundered and felt forced. And, in fairness, it’s not that every single moment of The Good Son sighs and floats on a cloud. The title track impresses for how well it balances the lilt and sorrow of its chorus with the driving energy of the verses, and "The Weeping Song" is similarly successful for how much open, negative space it leaves in its verses. Nevertheless, nearly every song soars on a chorus that embraces simple turns of phrase and easy melodies.

Of course, after a full album’s worth of such gentility, a little punch in the nose here and there might have been welcome. What it means, however, is that the songs which deviate from the formula even slightly register as outliers, from the sparse, whispered "Lament" to the hard-driving chorus of "The Witness Song," the latter of which in some ways anticipates some of the developments brought to glorious fruition on Abbatoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus. Without delving too much into personal biography, the gentler approach of this album, coupled with the unique (at this point) fact that, with the exception of the music for "Lucy," every song here was written entirely by Cave, suggests that the man may have in fact exorcised some of his own demons, just as the preceding album personified them so vividly. The Good Son remains a beguiling album and a welcome breath of fresh air from the stern intensity of the albums on either side of it. If you had written it off as lightweight fluff, it might just be time for a revisitation.

Grinderman - Grinderman 2 (2010)

Grinderman’s second album comes on the heels of both the success of Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! and Mick Harvey’s departure from the Bad Seeds. Harvey wasn’t a member of Grinderman, so that didn’t necessarily have a direct musical impact here, but the context is still useful. Grinderman 2 is not as universally explosive as the first album, but it does expand the band’s driving, lusty garage punk in some interesting, experimental ways. "Mickey Mouse And The Goodbye Man" kicks things off with familiar noise to set one’s teeth on edge, but the album soon takes plenty of turns for the weirder. Just as with the first Grinderman album, though, very little about Grinderman 2 feels over-thought. The basic instrumental skeletons are still thin, but the band floats even more flourishes atop those frames.

"When My Baby Comes" rides a similar soft groove to some of the Lazarus material, but then "What I Know" evacuates almost everything from the picture, leaving Cave to whisper-croon on top of crackling hiss, a submerged drum hit, and eerie vocal treatments. "Evil" unfurls a shuffling dirge that sounds a little like late-era Radiohead on a bad trip, but then "Palaces Of Montezuma" is simply one of the loveliest songs that Cave and his crew have put together since No More Shall We Part. The lyrical content is no less wry and obscene than on the first Grinderman album, but it is much less singularly focused on sexual carryings-on, with Cave indulging in flights of fancy that are equally disquieting and surreal. Still, as far as libidinous banter goes, "Worm Tamer" features one of Cave’s best one-liners in ages: "Well, my baby calls me the Loch Ness Monster:/ Two great big humps, and then I’m gone."

The album closes with "Bellringer Blues," reminding all and sundry just how often Cave apparently feels squeezed and pinched by some kind of blues ("Abbatoir Blues," "No Pussy Blues," the upcoming "Higgs Boson Blues," and so on). More importantly, though, it rides a grinding loop and sturdy drum beat off into a fire-ringed horizon, with lyrics that subconsciously bridge the chasm between "Let The Bells Ring" and "Lay Me Low" while pledging fealty to neither and spitting on the band’s amps with a snotty electric guitar lead. Grinderman 2 isn’t as strong or immediate an album as Grinderman, but it presented enough of a digression -- both from the first album and from anything in the Bad Seeds’ repertoire -- to make one wish the band had kept at it, just to see what other lands had yet to be visited with scuzzy brimstone.

The Firstborn Is Dead (1985)

Proving again that Nick Cave has one hell of a knack for opening tracks, "Tupelo" is one of the most perfect representations of this early era of the Bad Seeds (and also serves as an important reminder that Nick Cave is rarely "Nick Cave the solo artiste" -- the music for "Tupelo" is credited to Adamson and Harvey alone). Cave’s lyrics are a masterstroke, though, exchanging apocalyptic religious iconography and references to Elvis Presley’s birth (and the stillbirth of his twin brother, Jesse). Throughout the rest of the album, the transformation that has occurred since From Her To Eternity (released just one year earlier) is quite shocking.

Cave’s lyrical preoccupations have shifted even more to themes drawn from the blues, but here he seems to have brought the rest of the band along with him. From the slide guitar and twang of the suicide song "Say Goodbye To The Little Girl Tree" to the molasses swing of "Knockin’ On Joe" to the two-step of "Train Long-Suffering," the Bad Seeds prove themselves to be an increasingly malleable instrumental force, equally capable of sparseness and restraint as they were comfortable with hulking menace and swift-fingered attack on From Her To Eternity.

The cover of Bob Dylan’s "Wanted Man" (though most famous for having been performed by Johnny Cash on his landmark At San Quentin live album) is a particular highlight, not just for how it shows the Bad Seeds to have a deft hand with covers (a fact quite germane to the next item in their discography), but for how well the band adapts their skronky, percussion-heavy twitch to suit the song’s theme and historical lineage.

The Firstborn Is Dead is notable for being the most full-throated, album-long embrace of the blues that the Bad Seeds would ever produce. As such, it thrums with a resonant, Dust Bowl atmosphere, but with the entire album so relentlessly focused on its hard luck stories and sepia-hued themes, it occasionally comes across as a bit forced, and almost kitschy. The diffusion of that aesthetic unity on Kicking Against The Pricks would therefore be a welcome opening-up of the band’s sound, though the album as a whole is less accomplished. The Firstborn Is Dead remains fascinating for how little it represents a stepping stone to anything else that followed, except perhaps -- and only at the margins -- Henry’s Dream. In that sense, the thunder and rain that bookmark "Tupelo" might as well have enshrouded the entire album in its own self-contained world.

The Birthday Party - Prayers On Fire (1981)

What sets Prayers On Fire slightly apart from even the earliest, most primitive of the Bad Seeds material is that everything seems locked in a constant struggle, with Cave’s vocals vying with the bass and guitars for primacy. For even as loud and violent and chaotic as the Bad Seeds were on From Her To Eternity, that chaos all felt directed toward a unified purpose, which was not always the case with the Birthday Party. Whether the ramshackle nature of the Birthday Party is ultimately attributed to intentional looseness or debauched, drunken, and drug-addled sloppiness is beside the point: Prayers On Fire is the sound of a band smartening up even as they sound ready to spit in your eye and jab a broken bottle in your gut at any perceived slight.

Though Cave takes nearly all lyric-writing duties, he and Rowland Howard again nearly share songwriting credit. The band attacks their given instruments more fiercely than ever before, but they also deploy additional instrumental textures to greater, queasier effect. Tracy Pew’s bass playing is an even thicker, more rumbling descant, and the mariachi trumpet that turns up on "Zoo-Music Girl" is a stroke of idiotic genius. Phill Calvert’s clattering drums on "Figure Of Fun" bring out the carnival thrill of the organ, and the saxophone, clarinet, and piano that show up throughout the album add just enough shading to hint at the rich sounds that would eventually be taken up by the Bad Seeds. For now, though, everything is a blunt instrument wrenched and wrangled for maximum damage.

Lyrically, Cave had yet to explore much of the dark narrative talent that would soon flower, but his imagery is consistently engrossing as he spits out epigrammatic, surreal non sequiturs. At every turn, Prayers On Fire drips with overheated yet elliptical depravity, particularly on "King Ink," "Nick The Stripper," "Zoo-Music Girl," and "Yard." His voice veers from wailing doomsayer ("Cry") to cannibalistic snarl ("Nick The Stripper") to flamboyant and improbably staccato melody-maker ("King Ink"), but everywhere he sounds like a man utterly possessed with a sideways death-drive, a sincere urge to push everything outward. His tangled web of lyrical self-reference gets a jump-start here, as the line "If there’s one thing in this world I desire, it’s to make love to my zoo-music girl" calls to mind the wonderfully spat imprecation on "From Her To Eternity": "And I know that to possess her/ is therefore not to desire her..."

Some might find even more appeal in the Birthday Party on the verge of collapse, as witnessed with Junkyard, but Prayers On Fire balances controlled chaos with the sense that any song could, at any time, decide to rebel against its makers and start playing entirely on its own. It’s often a leering, slapdash, barely tuneful mess, but in the hands of such skilled savants, that makes for a glorious rock and roll eruption, and for the Birthday Party’s finest hour.

Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! (2008)

Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! benefits from all the lubed-up rock looseness of Grinderman, but repurposes that energy back into the context of the full Bad Seeds complement. The album demonstrates Cave’s lyrical skill yet again, as he mixes the mythic with the profane and daily banality with the larger-than-life. Perhaps nothing is clearer proof of the tireless rush of his sharp pen as the lyrical tour-de-force of the title track, which imagines a Lazarus raised from the dead into the modern world and abandoned to the vagaries of fame and obsession. "We Call Upon The Author To Explain" takes a similarly, shall we say, liberal interpretation of religious imagery, positing the author of creation as an absent figure, either unwilling or incapable of explaining the reason for things as they are.

Musically, the Bad Seeds cover a careening range of styles, from the creepy noir-reggae of "Moonland" to the fuzzed-out garage noise of "Albert Goes West" to the paranoid, Lyre Of Orpheus-like balladeering of "Hold On To Yourself," where Warren Ellis’s understated string loops almost call to mind Mick Harvey’s calamitous bass loops on Tender Prey’s "The Mercy Seat." The album as a whole is far less abrasive and needled with noisy outbursts as Grinderman’s debut, but much of the spontaneity and ragged energy remains in full view. One of the album’s most singular moments is "Night Of The Lotus Eaters," which embraces rigid repetition through loops and Harvey’s descending bass swing in such a way that it almost feels like the Bad Seeds have somehow steered their way onto Kraftwerk’s Autobahn.

Perhaps the most beneficent thing of all with Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! is the extent to which it simply sounds like a bunch of friends having a great time. That’s not to imply that the subject matter is all particularly cheery, but it feels like the Bad Seeds have internalized some of the grandiosity of the Abbatoir Blues material, but figured out how to explore it with their more traditional instrumental choices. And as closing songs go, "More News From Nowhere" is a nearly perfect comedown (and also happens to read like a natural precursor to "Higgs Boson Blues," from the most recent Bad Seeds album, Push The Sky Away). Lyrically, it’s another bit of Odyssey-referencing fun (as on "Night Of The Lotus Eaters"), as Cave sings "Strap me to the mast!" and describes a "Nubian princess" in ways that are very suggestive of Circe. But musically, the song is a gently meditative jam session, everyone swaying and shimmying in unison, while Mick Harvey softly jangles away on his electric guitar, effectively playing himself off-stage for the final time, because he would leave the Bad Seeds in early 2009.

Grinderman - Grinderman (2007)

One of the many avenues that the multifaceted Abbatoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus seems to have opened up for Cave and his Bad Seeds is the fuzzed-out, garage rock hell-bomb of Grinderman. Of course, this isn’t exactly the Bad Seeds, even though the personnel are entirely drawn from that collective; instead, Cave, Warren Ellis, Martyn Casey, and Jim Sclavunos split off from the mothership to float in their own spittle-flecked universe for a while. And there was great rejoicing...

Musically, one of the most notable elements of Grinderman is that it sees Cave mostly stepping away from the piano and picking up an electric guitar. In an interview with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, Cave described the different bodily attitudes of the two instruments, whereby one almost pushes away on a piano to play it, whereas a guitar is slung around the body and hugged tightly. Given the lustiness of Grinderman, one imagines the back of Cave’s guitar must be rubbed and scuffed from all the thrusting that must have gone on. Compared to the pristine, lush arrangements that the Bad Seeds had been turning in for much of the decade prior to Grinderman, this project has a loose and improvisatory feeling, with Sclavunos’s busy, clattering percussion and Casey’s rubbery bass sketching out rough goalposts in between which Cave’s guitar and Ellis’s cupboardful of stringed instruments flit and flail and free themselves.

Cave’s lyrics and vocals are similarly unrestrained, dripping with libido and a wolf’s curled-lip grin. The album’s finest moment of lyrical abandon is "No Pussy Blues," where an aging, paunched narrator attempts every trick he can think to persuade a young woman he sees in his audience to join him in certain carnal exploits. Cave’s guitar and Ellis’s electric bouzouki whip up a hellish racket as Cave wails "Damn! I got the no pussy blues!" and you grin and smirk and feel the keening spillover of unrequited lust. Though the album hits more spots than simple caveman sex-grunts, its most joyful moments are the ones that most fully embrace the blown-out excess of rock and roll amplification as raison d’être, such as "Depth Charge Ethel," "Get It On," and "Honey Bee (Let’s Fly To Mars)," on the latter of which Cave attacks his microphone with an explosive impression of a bee on the verge of cardiac arrest.

Even so, another of the album’s highlights is "Go Tell The Women," which is a simple, quiet shuffle, punctuated by repeated full-band stops and Cave’s beginner’s-level electric guitar plucking out a woozy three-note vamp. It seems relatively clear that the raw, sex-crazed energy of Grinderman spilled over at least a little bit into the Bad Seeds album that would follow, and Grinderman would go on to give the world one additional album, but nothing in Cave’s long career quite equals the greasy crotch mania of Grinderman, which is all the more reason to blow off your boss, grab a couple of beers, and play this thing loud enough to wake your slumbering bones.

No More Shall We Part (2001)

Four years separated The Boatman’s Call and No More Shall We Part, which was the longest gap by far between Bad Seeds albums to date. Cave married his current wife in 1999, in between the recording of the two albums, and it’s possible to assume that greater stability in his personal life led to a lessening of the stark emotional trauma heard in such visceral form on The Boatman’s Call. Still, No More Shall We Part is hardly a sunny album. It continues on in a mostly ballad-centric direction, but injects back into frame a bit of the drama and widescreen grandeur that was absent on The Boatman’s Call. Cave’s piano still provides the bedrock for most of these songs, but for the first time, Warren Ellis’s violin functions often as a lead instrument, which lends several of the songs an almost baroque atmosphere.

Though it’s difficult to pin down the precise lyrical conceit of much of the album, many of the songs seem to work together to form a loose narrative structure, and in fact, the impression the album gives is a bit like the dark undercurrent of the wild, lurking natural world as it appeared in a great deal of nineteenth-century English literature (think Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights). Songs like "As I Sat Sadly By Her Side," "Hallelujah," and "Fifteen Feet Of Pure White Snow" suggest a sick shut-in, an impotent convalescent alternately imprisoned and empowered by his nurse, his neighbors, and himself.

But then again, several songs are simply beautiful ballads, dripping with sumptuous instrumentation from a twelve-piece string section and the gorgeous backing vocals of famed Canadian folk singers Kate and Anna McGarrigle. "Sweetheart Come," "Love Letter," and "We Came Along This Road" all fall into this pattern, but No More Shall We Part is also marked by several brilliant explosions of sound, from the timeless "Hallelujah" to the great gospel-tinted crescendos of "Fifteen Feet Of Pure White Snow" to the unexpected cacophony of "The Sorrowful Wife." Even better is the quietly seething outrage and hypocrisy of "God Is In The House," where Cave’s voice hisses and snarls at no louder than a whisper ("and at night we’re on our knees, as quiet as a mouse...").

No More Shall We Part is something of a personal dark-horse favorite of mine, and to be honest, it’s a more richly textured, more immediately enjoyable album than The Boatman’s Call (even though the latter ultimately placed higher in this ranking). If you had written Cave off as soft by (or as a result of) this album, come back and give it another shot. There’s more darkness and shadowed menace here than you might remember.

Murder Ballads (1996)

As guest-studded and widescreen as it is unremittingly violent and bleak, Murder Ballads either wholly perplexingly or completely understandably brought Cave and his Bad Seeds to widespread critical and commercial acclaim. The ranks of the Bad Seeds were augmented yet again with the addition of Jim Sclavunos, but otherwise the group remains as on the preceding two albums. Although the albums are not explicitly connected (apart from the reference to a "red right hand" in "Song Of Joy"), it’s still tempting to view Henry’s Dream, Let Love In, and Murder Ballads as a loose trilogy of sorts. Despite its streak of savage humor, Murder Ballads is easily the grimmest of the three, even as the band continues to embrace a broad palette of styles and instrumental textures. But unlike the role that "New Morning" plays on Tender Prey and "Lay Me Low" on Let Love In, the cover of Dylan’s "Death Is Not The End" that closes Murder Ballads seems almost cruelly perverse in light of the cavalcade of murderous rogues that have just finished wandering the album’s pages.

Overcoming the violence of the subject matter proves relatively easy, however, given the effortless dexterity of the Bad Seeds again on display. The album opener "Song Of Joy" is easily the most disturbing song of the bunch, in no small part because of the way the band moves in great swelling sheets of sound, leaving the verse space a terrifyingly blank landscape for Cave’s gripping storytelling. The key line early in the song is "All things move toward their end," which proves just as fine a slogan as any for the entire album to follow. The Kylie Minogue duet "Where The Wild Roses Grow" was a smash hit single, and with good reason -- Minogue’s quavering, sympathetic vocals are a perfect match for Cave in the pose of a plainspoken murderer. "Henry Lee," while lovely enough, is almost more notable because it’s a duet between Cave and PJ Harvey, who were by all accounts in the midst of a torrid love affair during this album cycle. The dissolution of that affair would also prove the grist for Cave’s subsequent album The Boatman’s Call.

Not every track hits the mark, though. "The Kindness Of Strangers" feels, musically, like it could have come from the sessions for The Good Son, but here, given the plaintive lope of the piece and the weeping sounds from former Bad Seed (and former intimate of Cave) Anita Lane, it comes across as rather mawkish. "Crow Jane" hits a peculiarly jazzy note, and to be honest, ever since I noticed how much Martyn Casey’s bass line in the song sounds like the jazz standard "The Best Is Yet To Come," it’s been so painfully distracting that it ruins any other effect the song might have.

But the album’s triumphs, which are many, are such runaway successes as to lessen the impact of any less essential songs. The Bad Seeds’ take on the traditional "Stagger Lee" is so overstuffed with swagger and boozy aggression that one can’t help but thrill at being taken in, even as Cave spits such superficially absurd lyrics as "I’ll crawl over fifty good pussies just to get to one fat boy’s asshole." The song’s obscene conclusion -- soundtracked by Cave firing actual gun shots -- is one of those things that makes one feel legitimately awful for enjoying so much. The same goes doubly so for the riotously fun "The Curse Of Millhaven," which is a rollicking jam session that chronicles a series of unspeakable crimes committed by a fifteen-year-old girl, and the impossible-not-to-sing-along-with chorus: "All of God’s children, they all got to die." "Millhaven" is also of note because it features the Dirty Three’s (and future full-time Bad Seed) Warren Ellis putting in a crucial turn on lead violin (as well as accordion). And "O’Malley’s Bar" is just as hilarious as it is morbid, with Cave’s patient recitation of his narrator’s multiple murders inside the titular bar matched turn for turn by Conway Savage’s pitch-perfect organ vamping.

Truth be told, the litany of horrors that Murder Ballads delights in can get to be somewhat overwhelming, which means that, despite containing some of the Bad Seeds’ finest musical moments, it’s one of the ones I revisit least often. Each new return after an extended absence, though, still gives a great flying kick to the gut, so it can’t be so easily written off.

Push The Sky Away (2013)

To be truthful, it’s still a little difficult to know exactly where to place Push The Sky Away. Having been only released in February of 2013, this one is still settling in and revealing itself to Nick Cave’s audience. Still, every time I really sit and listen through the entire album, I come away with the unshakable impression that Push The Sky Away is yet another masterpiece, and one of the finest albums of the year. Though Cave was clearly busy with other pursuits (his ongoing work scoring films with Warren Ellis, and the second Grinderman album in 2010), the five-year interval between Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! and Push The Sky Away is the longest break between any two Bad Seeds albums. Moreover, following the departure of Mick Harvey from the band in 2009, it was almost anyone’s guess what a new Bad Seeds album might sound like. Remember that Harvey was not only the sole remaining founding member of the Bad Seeds from way back in ’83, but he and Cave had been in bands together ever since the earliest incarnation of the Boys Next Door from their school days in 1973. The severing of an artistic partnership that lasted that long is bound to have repercussions.

And of course, it does. The most immediately noticeable thing about Push The Sky Away is, basically, Harvey’s absence. Not just his absence, per se, but the absence of guitar. Warren Ellis is credited with providing some tenor guitar, and a guest player named George Vjestica plays a 12-string acoustic guitar on two songs, but beyond that, the absence of a dedicated guitar player opens up a fascinating textural vacuum in the Bad Seeds’ sound, and Push The Sky Away spends nearly all of its time exploring the new possibilities of that vacated post.

What this means, in large part, is that Push The Sky Away is the sparsest, most spacious, and most restrained Bad Seeds album ever. Certainly it’s more restrained than The Good Son and Your Funeral... My Trial, and possibly even more so than The Boatman’s Call, but despite this ghostly touch, the band still exudes considerable menace. Martyn Casey’s throbbing bass on "Water’s Edge" is hugely threatening, as Cave’s piano shades the edges of lines, and Thomas Wydler’s drums dart in and out with soft but free jazz fills. Casey’s bass on "We Real Cool" is even more central, plucking the same rhythm on one note for the song’s full duration.

One of the most impressive aspects of Push The Sky Away, then, is the way that the Bad Seeds still wring great drama from such a restricted dynamic range. In the rare instances where a song crescendos, even though the difference between the quiet and intense sections is quite small, the corresponding contrast lands with greater force because of how the listener’s expectations have been recalibrated. "Jubilee Street" is probably the best example of this, because it gradually adds in layers of guitar, strings, and a children’s choir, all before you’ve really realized what’s happening.

Apart from "Jubilee Street," "Higgs Boson Blues" is arguably the album’s centerpiece, and while it remains as inscrutable a chronicle of Cave’s worldview and the tumultuous uncertainty of modern life as anything the man has yet penned, it’s a fascinating pool of shimmering words to dive into, referencing Robert Johnson’s deal with the devil, the Lorraine Motel (where Martin Luther King was assassinated), missionaries bearing smallpox, and, yes, both Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus. I haven’t the faintest clue what Cave is talking about, but his vocal delivery crests and falls along with the band while he waxes in desperate, loping phrases, punctuated by "Can you feel my heart beat?" and "I can’t remember anything at all." Maybe it’s all a fever dream, then -- the song, the album, life, everything. And then, with an immaculate hush, the title track obliterates one’s sensual bearings and seems, beyond all reason, to be a simple plea for perseverance, even in the face of utter exhaustion and resignation. The song fades out, but Cave is still singing: "You’ve gotta just keep on pushing/ Push the sky away."

Push The Sky Away is a tremulous album, a candle near an open window always just on the verge of winking out. Its atmosphere is utterly unique in the Bad Seeds’ catalog, and it exudes a dark, fatalistic attraction, like a black hole beckoning home a derelict satellite. For those of us happy to bask in the fell penumbra of its gravity well, let’s hope the Bad Seeds find a way to push that sky a little further down the line.

Henry's Dream (1992)

Ask me to reorder these albums tomorrow, and you might just find Henry’s Dream at the top of the heap. After the downcast restraint of The Good Son, Henry’s Dream finds the Bad Seeds in a welcome return to heavier terrain, but it also ranks as one of the more diverse albums in the band’s catalog without ever feeling scattershot or disorganized. By this point, the Bad Seeds had also expanded in membership, so that, more than ever, they felt like a collective as much as a band. Henry’s Dream marks the first album to feature Conway Savage on piano and Martyn Casey on bass (both joined the band on The Good Son tour, and both remain in the band today). Henry’s Dream also seems, for whatever it’s worth, to have marked the arrival of the Bad Seeds as a Big Deal, as evidenced by the huge European and Australian tour in support of the album, which was later documented in the excellent live recording, Live Seeds.

To these ears, too, Henry’s Dream is the first Bad Seeds album to feel modern. It’s a perfectly unscientific metric, but something about the quality of the album’s recording makes it sound as though it could have been released in 2002 or 2012 instead of 1992, whereas even The Good Son, from just two years before, has hallmarks of 1980s rock/pop recording. I imagine someone more well-versed than I am in recording technology can jump in and rip my theory to shreds, but it remains an intangible distinction: Henry’s Dream feels like a fulcrum, with all Bad Seeds albums before and after balanced on either side of its sonic divide.

Disregarding all of the circumstantial minutiae, Henry’s Dream is one of the most solid, self-contained collections of songs Cave and the Seeds had yet put down. The apocalyptic clamor of "Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry" is perfectly echoed in the string accompaniment that crowds the song’s margins, and the relatively unadorned "Straight To You" wouldn’t sound particularly out of place on The Boatman’s Call. The band is in fine visceral form throughout the album, moving in gestures as direct and concise as Cave’s words are expansive and elaborate, and "Christina The Astonishing" serves as a show-stopping oddity in much the same way that "The Carny" did on Your Funeral... My Trial.

For this listener’s money, though, the true gem of Henry’s Dream is "John Finns’ Wife." It finds Cave in wonderful storytelling mode, and yet his words are imagistic and ambiguous enough to avoid accusations of oversimplification. And still, despite the fact that the song is clearly driven forward by Cave’s constantly tripping, spilling words, the arrangement is more subtle than you might recall if it’s been a while: Harvey plays some organ in the background, and the strings that move alongside a few verses are plain enough so as to not intrude. The most thrilling thing, however, is the wonderfully fluid way that the whole band trades instrumental emphasis with the shifting action and mood of the song. Casey’s bass playing works as a soothing anchor against the impatience of Bargeld’s background guitar that gathers and gutters like the rising tension of which the narrator speaks.

And then, oooh mercy, that coda. For me, at least, that perfect line -- "John Finns’ wife took all the flowers down from her hair/ And threw them on the ground" -- has always allowed just enough ambiguity to make it unclear whether she throws them to the ground in mourning of her dead husband, or as a way to indicate that she had only used the unnamed narrator to provoke and murder her "mad" husband. Personally, I lean to the latter interpretation, but I think the song allows one to go either way. Regardless, the song is a beautiful encapsulation of Cave’s songwriting abilities, and of the versatility and sensitivity of the Bad Seeds as a working band. That the song manages to look ahead to Murder Ballads at the same time as it looks back to the blues and frontier preoccupations of earlier Bad Seeds albums is just an additional facet to its many fine qualities.

The photo on the inner sleeve of Henry’s Dream shows the six members of the band sitting together in a cluttered recording studio, in the middle of running through a song. Cave holds a microphone, seated on a stool with lyric sheets at his feet. It’s still the default way I imagine the band: a bunch of guys, instruments in hand, hammering it out as they go along. What a remarkably good album.

Abattoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus (2004)

In which Nick Cave preaches the secular gospel. Much as with The Boatman’s Call, the glorious successes of Abbatoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus are made possible in large part by the idiosyncrasies of juxtaposition. That is, if Nocturama hadn’t been such a lackluster effort, it’s entirely possible that this double album wouldn’t have had such a joyous, fevered racket to make in the interest of reclaiming lost territory. Nevertheless, time and turmoil aside, the huge stylistic sprawl and songwriting heights of this double album make one hell of an argument that Cave and his Seeds were rejuvenated and simply teeming with ideas and energy. So much so, in fact, that the album often feels very nearly on the verge of collapsing under the weight of its own fertility. The strength of the songwriting, though, along with the versatility of the Bad Seeds and the canny decision to generally segregate the rock outbursts and ballads to their own discs, means that Abbatoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus is a modern-day classic, and feels like a creative rebirth.

Abbatoir Blues is highlighted by the gospel irruptions of "Get Ready For Love" and "There She Goes, My Beautiful World," the former of which features perhaps one of the Nick Cave-iest Nick Cave lyrics ever penned: "Praise Him ‘til you’ve forgotten what you’re praising Him for/ Then praise Him a little bit more." Despite the departure of Blixa Bargeld following Nocturama, Mick Harvey sounds like an entire army of guitarists here, squealing and noodling and riffing and cutting in and out of frame across the entire album with a wilder yet more constrained garage rock bandit wail than we’ve likely heard since the Birthday Party days. Even though this is the "rock" side of the album, there is considerably subtlety, as on the slinky "Hiding All Away," which skirts and feints right until the tension is unbearable, and then, well, "there is a war coming." Another of the album’s indisputable gems is "Let The Bells Ring," the sturdily aching tribute to Johnny Cash (who died in 2003, not long after both recording Cave’s classic "The Mercy Seat" and singing with Cave on Hank Williams’s "I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry").

The Lyre Of Orpheus is hardly less powerful, despite the toned-down nature of the instrumental arrangements. The title track is a grimly hilarious retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which the musician’s famed instrument becomes a murderous tool, eventually killing his wife and awaking God, who then kills Orpheus, too, sending him down to Hell. The contrast with the fanciful flute and delicate strum of "Breathless" is striking, even though both move with quieter gestures. Warren Ellis’s strings animate the beguiling folk dance of "Supernaturally," and "Easy Money" simmers in low, tense beauty. "O Children" brings the full double album to a close in shimmering, gothic intensity, with the London Community Gospel Choir lifting the chorus to a rising swell of self-defeating praise that underscores the disquieting, Murder Ballads-esque lyrics. (In what surely must rank as one of the most bizarre song licensing arrangements of all time, "O Children" was used in Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, Part One, issuing from a radio while Harry and Hermione engage in a head-scratching bit of giggling dance in a tent pitched in the woods.)

If Nocturama felt flat and without direction, Abbatoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus is spoiled for choice as it finds Cave and the Bad Seeds rocketing off in one hundred different directions at once. Listening back to all these albums in order, and placing them in context, it’s hard to see this double album as anything other than a creative renaissance, one that provided limitless avenues for future exploration for the participants, and yet, one that has not since been matched in terms of emotional weight and graceful clutter.

From Her To Eternity (1984)

Although it’s tempting to view the Bad Seeds as simply a continuation of the Birthday Party, that’s not quite fair to either the separate type of mangled imprecations hurled by The Birthday Party or the sound and songwriting approach toward which Nick Cave would steer this new project, which toured briefly under the name Nick Cave and the Cavemen before settling on Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Of course, Mick Harvey’s presence in the Bad Seeds right from the start suggests some Birthday Party continuity (as well as Barry Adamson, who had done a bit of recording with the Birthday Party for the Junkyard sessions), but what turns out to have been particularly momentous is the inclusion of Blixa Bargeld on guitar. Despite Harvey being primarily a guitar player, on From Her To Eternity he provides almost everything but, leaving guitar duties to Bargeld and first- (and only-) time Bad Seed Hugo Race (though Race also provided guest guitar on a few songs on Kicking Against The Pricks).

Having provided guest guitar strangling on "Mutiny In Heaven" from the final Birthday Party EP Mutiny!, Bargeld’s avant-garde credentials with his own pioneering industrial band Einsturzende Neubauten were already beyond reproach. His contributions to the album provide some of the most jarring moments, as his guitar punches in almost randomly with stabs and squeals of noise. In fact, in listening back to everything in succession, it almost seems like the more natural transition would have been from the Birthday Party’s material on Mutiny! and The Bad Seed directly into The Firstborn Is Dead. As such, From Her To Eternity feels like a fruitful aberration, as if Bargeld’s addition to the band required a more primal purging of sound before they could resume their future course.

What’s truly startling about From Her To Eternity is how masterfully the Bad Seeds put down a proper album on this, their very first attempt. Every trace of the Birthday Party’s post-punk thrashing has been completely exorcised, and while the album does its fair share of noisy carrying-on, it’s done with a much grimmer, focused intent. This much is made clear from the very outset, with the brilliant, wracked cover of Leonard Cohen’s "Avalanche." The song replaces Cohen’s flurry of finger-picking with roiling drum rolls on the floor toms, which constantly ebb and flow, always threatening, like Cave’s voice, to spill over into overt aggression, but then pulling back just at the edge. One of the obvious highlights is the title track, which surges ceaselessly forward with its nervous, paranoid one-two-three one-two-three one-two beat, and lyrics that find Cave inhabiting perfectly a narrative mindset of obsession and raw psychosis. Likewise, "Cabin Fever!" and "Saint Huck" are always pitching forwards, stumbling at the listener with red eyes and white knuckles.

But even in the midst of this brackish morass, there is great subtlety. Though "Well Of Misery" is easiest to remember for its call-and-response, work song-like pace, with patient yet relentless percussion hits miming the hammers of a chain-gang busting rocks, Mick Harvey provides beautiful low accompaniment on vibraphone. Along with Cave’s plaintive harmonica, this song (as well as "Saint Huck," if mostly from a lyrical standpoint) was an early indication of how much further Cave’s fascination with Americana, from Delta blues to themes of the Western frontier, would eventually travel. The ultimate death-dirge shuffle of "A Box For Black Paul" is a dust-clotted capstone to a tremendous artistic statement -- "O yeah, Death favors those that favor Death."

Although "In the Ghetto" and "The Moon Is In The Gutter" show Cave’s balladeering aspirations, keeping in mind that the album’s original seven-song LP release did not include them means that From Her To Eternity was an even more single-minded exploration of jittery rhythmic pulsation and gnawing, claustrophobic unease. The Bad Seeds would soon explore a much broader palette of sounds, and arguably with much greater sophistication and technical mastery than on From Her To Eternity. Still, for its pitch-perfect evocation of dread, existential melancholy, and arcane imagery, the album is one of Cave’s unimpeachable triumphs.

The Boatman's Call (1997)

The fact that The Boatman’s Call ended up so high on this list quite honestly surprised even me. Part of that result is due to its fortuitous juxtaposition. If The Boatman’s Call had followed, say, The Good Son instead of Murder Ballads, it’s entirely possible that it wouldn’t have made such a stark, soul-baring impact. As it is, though, the complete about-face from the raucous, destructively brilliant death-folk of Murder Ballads to the naked, personal hurt of The Boatman’s Call still stuns like a thunderclap. This is one of the spots in Cave’s discography where it’s almost impossible to ignore biographical information, because the album’s gestation and subject matter were drawn from both the end of Cave’s marriage of six years to Brazilian journalist Viviane Carneiro and from the whirlwind romance and bust-up of Cave’s brief relationship with PJ Harvey.

As a result, The Boatman’s Call is full of sorrow, anger, and self-loathing, but the songs always present those emotions with such direct, head-on honesty and guilelessness that one never feels manipulated. This is an album utterly without affectation or mythology, and Cave’s voice throughout is as bare and unadorned as the sparse instrumental accompaniments. On that note, The Boatman’s Call very often sounds like a solo album, with a lovelorn Nick Cave sitting at the piano, eyes half-closed in purgation of still stinging wounds. But the Bad Seeds are here, of course, as they always are. What impresses consistently throughout this album is the great pains to which the band has gone to appear almost invisible. Listen, for example, to the delicate, almost back-sliding plod of "People Ain’t No Good," where everyone but Cave seems almost reluctant to even make it to the next beat.

Though Cave is in full confessional mode throughout the album, his past lyrical preoccupations haven’t quite deserted him, and thus his musings on lost love are frequently filtered through a searching, uncertain religious framework, as on "Into My Arms" and "Brompton Oratory." You could almost think of The Boatman’s Call as Cave’s Blood On The Tracks, but that’s reductive, and more than a little unfair to the scope of both albums. Warren Ellis was, by this point, a full-time member of the band, and although his contributions, like those of all the Bad Seeds, are vanishingly subdued, his violin adds a bluegrass tinge to "West Country Girl." That song helps to form one of several intra-album connections with "Black Hair," the song that follows and ends with the crushing simplicity of the lyric "Today she took a train to the west." The music on "Black Hair" is equally simplistic, but is hauntingly marked by the inescapable melancholy of Mick Harvey’s bass organ (the sound of which always brings to mind, for me, the equally heart-breaking sounds of the harmonium-led Current 93 album Sleep Has His House).

The album’s true revelation lies in its starkness and precision. There’s nothing here beyond the barest skeletal trappings of an arrangement, leaving the focus on Cave’s wounded verse, which can coil and strike with a brutally raw and painful impact, as on "Where Do We Go Now But Nowhere?" The album’s twin masterpieces, however, must be the heart-stoppingly perfect love song "Into My Arms," and the wrenching lament of "Far From Me," which opens with heroic, Christ-like selflessness, but ends with asking the departed lover "Did you ever care for me?" The album’s sentiments are so sharp and plain that it can feel almost voyeuristic, like listening in to the interior monologue of heartbroken self-abnegation. It stings like salt in an open sore, and yet, paradoxically, the idyllic beauty of the music makes The Boatman’s Call a bruising salve in turbulent times. It’s a mysterious, magical record, and a stunning triumph.

Tender Prey (1988)

Following the relatively lackluster Your Funeral... My Trial, one would hardly have expected Tender Prey to be one of Nick Cave’s impeccable masterstrokes with the Bad Seeds. Even less so would one have expected a seven-minute long, punishingly monotonous and ferociously taut song about a death row inmate to become the one song that Cave would be best known for. "The Mercy Seat" is, of course, an irreproachably brilliant piece of songwriting, but beyond that, it’s the first time that Cave proved that he truly deserved to be considered among the other songwriting titans of the late twentieth century -- Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits, and whomever else you care to throw into the mix. The song’s lyrics are inspired enough to stand on their own merits, but the original album arrangement of the song is what breathes life into and animates the tortured sentiments and dogged stubbornness of the narrator, from the gnarled loop made from Mick Harvey punishing a bass guitar, to Thomas Wydler’s crackling, unrelenting snare drum, to the guest string section that scythes and struts as the song continues to what can’t rightly be called a crescendo, but rather a plateau that constantly ratchets the tension until every nerve in the listener’s body feels just as frayed and desperate as the narrator contemplating the electric chair and its incomprehensible kiss.

Given the immensity of its opening song, the rest of Tender Prey could have been forgiven for suffering from a bit of an inferiority complex. Thankfully, the remainder of the material is diverse enough (and, even more importantly, dark and entirely doom-wracked enough) that it doesn’t need to invite direct comparison, and in fact the Bad Seeds feel hungrier and more on fire here than they have since From Her To Eternity. Many of the album’s best moments come from gleefully diabolical contrast, as on "Deanna," where the irresistible, danceable sway of the organ and drumbeat distract -- if only momentarily -- from such lines as "we’ll unload into their heads" and "I cum a death’s head into your frock." The voyeurism of "Watching Alice" is leavened by the gentle piano and the softly mournful cant of Cave’s vocal, presenting this as the domesticated version of "From Her To Eternity." Mick Harvey is the star of "Up Jumped The Devil," providing both a bass line that swaggers like it wants to fight you and some appropriately creepy-crawly xylophone.

But of course, Cave himself is the stand-out star of Tender Prey. His vocals cycle through an impressive variety of deliveries, and "Slowly Goes The Night" might be one of the first songs to really show his knack for singing ballads. And most importantly, out of every single corner and off every imagined page, his words leap like snakes: "Who’s that hanging from the gallow tree?/ His eyes are hollow but he looks like me" (from "Up Jumped The Devil"); "While you kneel at the feet of a woman of the street/ The gutters will run with blood; they will run with blood!" (from "City Of Refuge"); and "My death, it almost bored me/ So often was it told" (from "Mercy"). The great, grinding menace of "Sugar Sugar Sugar," and the way it cuts such a delectable contrast with the spacious, sing-along praise chorus of the album closer "New Morning" presage the entire mode of operation for the only other album of Cave’s that would prove a greater statement. "New Morning," with its uplifting tilt (no matter how much the rest of the album seems to subvert its very sentiment), and with all instrumentation handled by the long-faithful Bad Seeds core of Cave, Harvey, and Bargeld feels like a well-deserved victory lap just as much as it does a signal that this band which had already progressed so much was still sailing for broader vistas. And anyway, I told the truth.

Let Love In (1994)

It says something about the overall quality and consistency of Nick Cave’s musical output that you could make a case for any one of the top five or six albums I’ve ranked here as being the Bad Seeds’ best and I wouldn’t be too put out. Still, almost from the start of this undertaking, Let Love In seemed destined for the number one spot. No other album in this vast catalog matches Let Love In for the perfect balance between fire and succor, ballad and curse, ugliness and beauty, cruelty and kindness. Coming off the wild success of Henry’s Dream, Let Love In is interesting for the way in which it actually scales back the focus on Cave’s narrative gifts. This isn’t to say that the album is lyrically vapid, but rather than the storytelling arcs that dominated the last several Bad Seeds album -- at least all the way back to Tender Prey -- are mostly toned down in favor of supremely evocative portraits. Call them narrative snapshots, if you want. He hasn’t regressed to the surrealistic dirt-punk poetry of the Birthday Party, but instead offered up a series of meditations on love, from the grotesque to the unseemly to the counterintuitive, but all with a sensitivity and sharply attuned ear for detail -- "They’ll sound a flugelhorn"; "a voice that stinks of death and vanilla"; "nailed across the doorways of the bedrooms of my dreams"; "My lady of the Various Sorrows."

The personnel in the Bad Seeds were unchanged between Henry’s Dream and Let Love In, and the band’s intuitive communication shows through the way in which each song -- many with ornate, highly involved arrangements -- feels unforced, and with each piece accorded the appropriate space. Perhaps as a result of this intimacy and familiarity, the album is able to unfold in a way that gives it a thematic unity that doesn’t quite exist in any other Bad Seeds album. And honestly, this is no small feat, because it means that even such wild, raucous explosions of noise as "Jangling Jack" and "Thirsty Dog" never feel out of place alongside the gentler fare like "Ain’t Gonna Rain Anymore" and "Nobody’s Baby Now." Whereas The Good Son was clearly a ballads record, and Henry’s Dream felt like an intentional reclamation of rock by means of responding to its softness, Let Love In moves through ballad and rocker, feedback and string cadence, gentle words and hideous, hurtful words all in their time.

But beyond whatever overblown gestalt one might care to extract from the album, Let Love In is first and foremost an album of phenomenal songs. "Loverman" is such a hulking, disgusting, lust-drenched behemoth of a song, and yet it operates according to some fairly balanced dynamics. (Dynamics which, it ought to be added, were almost entirely trampled over by Metallica’s limply crude -- if well-intentioned -- cover version.) With "Jangling Jack," one can almost feel the cackle of glee rising from Cave’s glass-shard-gargling vocals, and from the lusty backing vocals. The album’s thematic unity is of course largely a product of the fact that the album begins and ends with different versions of "Do You Love Me?"

But of course, the true masterpiece of Let Love In is "Red Right Hand." If "The Mercy Seat" is rightly one of Nick Cave’s best-known songs as a songwriter, then "Red Right Hand" deserves to be the best-known song by the Bad Seeds, bar none. (Though the words are by Cave, the music is credited to Harvey, Wydler, and Cave, so it clearly wasn’t a solo effort in that respect.) The spare, jazzy shuffle of the song, and the otherworldly groan and whorl of the organ, and the simple, matter-of-fact vocal delivery conspire to make "Red Right Hand" the scariest quiet song you’ve ever heard. Add to all of that lyrics that are just oblique enough to make the song’s meaning a point of debate rather than certainty, and one is left eternally puzzling over how one song could be so absolutely perfect. I mean, okay, maybe you can read a line like "You’re one microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan/ Designed and directed by his red right hand" without collapsing in fits of horrified awe, but if so, you are made of sterner stuff than I.

Just like "New Morning" provides such a fitting closure to Tender Prey, so does "Lay Me Low" for Let Love In (despite the fact that it’s not the closing song). The puckish yet sincere celebration of the narrator’s future death procession is an utter joy to bleat along with, and while one should be careful not to ascribe his narrator’s sentiments to the man himself, it’s pretty hard to hear Nick Cave sing "They’ll see my work in a different light, when I go" without giving it the glimmer of autobiographical suggestion.

Nearly twenty years later, and here’s why Let Love In is still Nick Cave’s finest hour: It implicates you, the listener, in the unseemly and otherworldly celebration of lust, love, life, and death. So come on - let’s go bang that big old gong together.