Back in the day, Nick Cave made rock’n’roll with the Bad Seeds. Though as the years have gone by the Australian’s style has evolved, particularly due to the premature death of his 15-year-old son. Ever since, he has used music as a kind of spiritual outlet, reaching a peak with Skeleton Tree - one of his greatest records but also one of the hardest to understand. Throughout the history of humanity, the mourning process has given rise to artistic creation and with this album, released in 2016, Cave became another craftsman in this category. There was no longer any barrier between the grief of what he went through and the words and notes he recorded. Three years later, the rock crooner has produced a sequel to what was thought to be an unbeatable Skeleton Tree. As the seventeenth studio album made with the Bad Seeds, Ghosteen is split in two: “The songs on the first album are the children. The songs on the second album are their parents.” In 2017, Cave declared that the next Bad Seeds’ record would not be an answer to Skeleton Tree but rather “the artistic completion of a trilogy of albums we began with Push the Sky Away.” In terms of melody and rhythm, Ghosteen’s eleven tracks are anything but conventional. The frontman’s voice and lyrics are the driving force, accompanied by layers of synths and loops composed by Warren Ellis and joined by a few haunting piano notes and a distant violin. Nick Cave has joined his brothers-in-arms Leonard Cohen and Scott Walker. And Nico from Desertshore as well. Yet the Australian’s journey here is mostly solitary as he constructs a world where pain becomes a dream and tears are transformed into morning dew. To mix despair with empathy, sadness and faith in this way is something quite unprecedented in pop music today. The atmosphere is mirrored on the album cover too: a drawing as beautiful as it is kitsch, as if it has been taken from a collection of fairy tales with magical animals and multi-coloured vegetation. One leaves Ghosteen without knowing if all this is heaven or hell. Or perhaps both at the same time? © Marc Zisman/Qobuz

With this February 1996 album, Nick Cave took up his role as the bipolar preacher, caught between sin and redemption. Half goth-punk Johnny Cash, half infernal Lee Hazlewood, the brains of the Bad Seeds, a crooner to the core, told his stories of death, betrayal, sex, violence and passion... His cavernous voice and his Biblical pen fascinated fans. Behind him, the Bad Seeds were knitting together a blood-red score, a cocktail of blues and jazz on ghostly pianos, disquieting guitars and martial percussions. This is a Nick Cave in full Nosferatu mode, and he even has a couple of virgins to snack on: his double, PJ Harvey, on Henry Lee, and his compatriot Kylie Minogue for an erotic thriller entitled Where The Wild Roses Grow. © Marc Zisman/Qobuz

Murder Ballads brought Nick Cave's morbidity to near-parodic levels, which makes the disarmingly frank and introspective songs of The Boatman's Call all the more startling. A song cycle equally inspired by Cave's failed romantic affairs and religious doubts, The Boatman's Call captures him at his most honest and despairing -- while he retains a fascination for gothic, Biblical imagery, it has little of the grand theatricality and self-conscious poetics that made his albums emotionally distant in the past. This time, there's no posturing, either from Cave or the Bad Seeds. The music is direct, yet it has many textures, from blues to jazz, which offer a revealing and sympathetic bed for Cave's best, most affecting songs. The Boatman's Call is one of his finest albums and arguably the masterpiece he has been promising throughout his career.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

Keeping the same line-up from Henry's Dream, Nick Cave and company turn in yet another winner with Let Love In. Compared to Henry's Dream, Let Love In is something of a more produced effort -- longtime Cave boardsman Tony Cohen oversees things, and from the first track, one can hear the subtle arrangements and carefully constructed performances. Love, unsurprisingly, takes center stage of the album. Besides concluding with a second part to "Do You Love Me?," two of its stronger cuts are the (almost) title track "I Let Love In," and "Loverman," an even creepier depiction of lust's throttling power so gripping that Metallica ended up covering it. On the full-on explosive front, "Jangling Jack" sounds like it wants to do nothing but destroy sound systems, strange noises and overmodulations ripping throughout the song. The Seeds can always turn in almost deceptively peaceful performances as well, of course -- standouts here are "Nobody's Baby Now," with a particularly lovely guitar/piano line, and the brooding drama of "Ain't Gonna Rain Anymore." The highlight of the album, though, has little to do with love and everything to do with the group's abilities at music noir. "Red Right Hand" depicts a nightmarish figure emerging on "the edge of town," maybe a criminal and maybe something more demonic. Cave's vicious lyric combines fear and black humor perfectly, while the Seeds' performance redefines "cinematic," a disturbing organ figure leading the subtle but crisp arrangement and Harvey's addition of a sharp bell ratcheting up the feeling of doom and judgment.© Ned Raggett /TiVo

When Blixa Bargeld left Nick Cave's Bad Seeds, who would have predicted his departure would result in one of the finest offerings in the band's catalog? Abbatoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus is a double CD or, rather, two completely different albums packaged in one very handsome box with a stylish lyric booklet and subtly colored pastel sleeves. They were recorded in a total of 16 days by producer Nick Launay (Kate Bush, Midnight Oil, Girls Against Boys, Silverchair, INXS, Virgin Prunes, et al.). Abbatoir Blues, the first disc in the set (packaged in pink, of course), is a rock & roll record. Yeah, the same guy who released the Boatman's Call, No More Shall We Part, and Nocturama albums has turned in a pathos-drenched, volume-cranked rocker, full of crunch, punishment -- and taste. Drummer Jim Sclavunos' aggressive, propulsive kit work is the bedrock of this set. It and Mick Harvey's storm-squall guitar playing shake things loose on "Get Ready for Love," which opens the album. As Cave goes right for God in the refrain -- "get ready for love" -- in the maelstrom, a gospel choir roaring "praise Him" responds. His tense, ambivalent obsession with theology is pervasive; he mocks the Western perception of God in the heavens yet seeks the mystery of His nature. That he does so while careening through a wall of noisy rock damage is simply stunning. It leaves the listener revved up and off-center for what comes next. The chorus -- members of the London Community Gospel Choir -- is prevalent on both records; the Bad Seeds' arrangement utilizes them wisely as counterpoint and mirror for Cave's own baritone. "Cannibal's Hymn" begins as a love song musically; it's chocked with Cave's dark wit and irony and ends far more aggressively while retaining its melody. The single, "Nature Boy," finds itself on Scalvunos' big beat. Cave and his piano use love's irony in contrast with cheap innuendo as underlined by the choir in their best soul croon. "Let Them Bells Ring" is a most dignified and emotionally honest tribute to Johnny Cash and the world he witnessed. The Western wrangle of "There She Goes, My Beautiful World" references Morricone's desert cowboy groove against a swirling cacophony of drums, bashing piano, and the chorus swelling on the refrain, while Cave name drops Johnny Thunders and poet Philip Larkin. The pace is fantastic; its drama and musical dynamics are pitched taut, with lulls in all the right places.The Lyre of Orpheus, by contrast, is a much quieter, more elegant affair. It is more consciously restrained, its attention to craft and theatrical flair more prevalent. But that doesn't make it any less satisfying. It is a bit of a shock after Abbatoir Blues, but it isn't meant for playing immediately afterward; it is a separate listening experience. The title track tells the myth's tale in Cave's ironical fashion, where God eventually throws a hammer at the subject and Eurydyce threatens to shove his lyre up his nether orifice. Warren Ellis' swampy bouzouki and Thomas Wydler's more stylized drumming move the band in the tense, skeletal swirl where chorus and Cave meet the music in a loopy dance. But in "Breathless," the bard of the love song emerges unfettered at the top of his poetic gift. On "Babe You Turn Me On," he wraps a bawdy yet tender love song in a country music waltz to great effect. But on this album, along with the gentleness, is experimentation with textures and wider dimensions. The sparser sound is freer, less structured; it lets time slip through the songs rather than govern them -- check the wall of Ellis' strings married to a loping acoustic guitar on the moving "Carry Me" as an example. Cave's nastiness and wit never remains absent for long, however, and on "O Children," the album's closer, it returns with this skin-crawlingly gorgeous ballad of murder and suicide. This set is an aesthetic watermark for Cave, a true high point in a long career that is ever looking forward.© Thom Jurek /TiVo

Alphaville's 1984 debut, Forever Young, deserves to be viewed as a classic synth pop album. There's no doubting that Germans are behind the crystalline Teutonic textures and massive beats that permeate the album, but vocalist Marian Gold's impressive ability to handle a Bryan Ferry croon and many impassioned high passages meant the album would have worldwide appeal. Indeed both "Big in Japan" and the touching, sad change-of-pace "Forever Young" raced up the charts in multiple continents. Borrowing inspiration from Roxy Music's detached theatricality and Kraftwerk's beats and rhythms, Gold and company hit upon a magic formula that produced here an album's worth of impossibly catchy tunes that could almost serve as pure definitions for the synth pop genre. The hits race straight for one's cranium and embed themselves upon impact. "Big in Japan" feels like a more serious cousin to Murray Head's "One Night in Bangkok," as a slow-pounding beat spars with Gold's desperate voice. "Forever Young," a stark, epic song that would become essential for every post-1984 high school graduation, drips sadness and never fails to cause a listener to nostalgically reflect on life and loss. Outside of these hits, the remainder of the songs rarely falter, mixing emotion, theater, and of course electronics into a potent, addictive wave of synth euphoria. It's likely every fan could pick his own favorite of the other should-have-been-hits, but "Fallen Angel" deserves special mention. It begins with spooky, funny warbling and icy keyboards, and then explodes and transforms into a startling, romantic epiphany at the chorus. If its lyrics are a bit goofy or juvenile, it only adds to the heartfelt love the song expresses. Alphaville stick firmly to their synths and sequencers on Forever Young, but they keep things interesting by incorporating motifs from funk, Broadway, Brazilian jazz, and even hip-hop. Even when the band takes itself too seriously, the songs' catchy drive and consistently smart production cover any thematic holes. Forever Young is a technically perfect and emotionally compelling slice of 1980s electronic pop/rock music. It's also a wonderfully fun ride from start to finish.© Tim DiGravina /TiVo

The time of Nick Cave the rock’n’roll radical is long gone. Once an erratic punk showman possessed by the ghosts of old greats like Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Howlin’ Wolf and others… Time has very much smoothed down those edges, the Australian now dips his quill in a very different ink following the death of his son at the age of 15. With Skeleton Tree (2016) and Ghosteen (2019), the Bad Seeds frontman’s art transformed into a mystical outlet. Creation in grief, for grief. It is often through grief that stories of humanity are told and these albums provide a crushing reminder of this fact. Released in Autumn 2020, Idiot Prayer is solemn in form but not substance. Voluntarily yes, but mostly due to the 2020 pandemic. Nick Cave is thus alone here, without his Bad Seeds or anyone else for that matter. Just him and a piano in Alexandra Palace, London. The performance was transmitted live online on the 23rd of July 2020. For this unique performance, the setlist goes beyond his last two albums (from which he plays only three songs) and sees Cave trawl through old Bad Seeds records (Stranger Than Kindness, The Ship Song, Black Hair, (Are You) the One That I’ve Been Waiting For, The Mercy Seat…) and his other group, Grinderman (Man in the Moon, Palaces of Montezuma…). Only one new composition is included, Euthanasia, a melancholic hymn and study of loss…His magnificent voice resonates within this grandiose 19th century Victorian palace enveloping the author in words of flesh and blood, surrealist and candid poetry. Nick Cave resembles here Robert Mitchum’s character in The Night of the Hunter who tattoos the words LOVE and HATE onto each of his hands and makes them fight each other. Through mixing love songs, murder ballads and tortured hymns, the Australian crooner offers a most beautiful treasure trove, a guided tour of his oeuvre. And such limited instrumentals bring out the best in his voice (he has rarely sung so well) strengthening his old songs tenfold. Marvellous. © Marc Zisman/Qobuz

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Along with the mega-platinum Songs from the Big Chair, The Seeds of Love rendered Tears for Fears one of the '80s most successful pop groups. The album was created during a profound period of catharsis. Curt Smith was going through a divorce while Roland Orzabal was in primal therapy. Musically, it's their most sophisticated outing, and it should be: It took four years, four producers, and over a million pounds to complete. The duo sought to distance themselves from the synth pop of their earlier records in favor of a more organic approach using live musicians. Included in this all-star cast are Kate St. John, Jon Hassell, Robbie Macintosh, and Ian Stanley. Orzabal began writing in 1985 with touring keyboardist Nicky Holland and continued in London in 1986. Their collaboration netted half the album's tracks, including "Bad Man's Song." Due to outside pressures, Smith's only co-writing credit is the soaring title track, though he played, sang, and advised on all charts and mixes. The album's Muse is American vocalist/pianist Oleta Adams. Orzabal caught her set in a hotel bar in 1985 and asked her two years later to duet on the transcendent album-opener "Woman in Chains." It set the tone for the entire proceeding. (The glorious drumming on the cut is by Phil Collins.) Adams also contributed gospel vocals to "Bad Man's Song," which features a Holland piano intro strongly suggestive of Weather Report's "Birdland." The presence of drummer Manu Katche and bassist Pino Palladino underscores it. The production chart for "Sowing the Seeds of Love" borrows heavily from the Beatles' "I Am the Walrus," but ends up as a spiritual, sociopolitical anthem in its own sonic universe. Smith's devastatingly beautiful refrain and the brief, seemingly errant entrance of an operatic soprano and a choir, frame the panoramic horns, strings, and Fairlight orchestrations, resulting in one of the duo's most enduring songs. On "Advice for the Young at Heart," Smith's and Holland's vocals entwine in a melody grounded in blue-eyed soul, jazz, and elegant pop that recalls the Style Council. Hassell's fourth world trumpet introduces the lithe "Standing on the Corner of the Third World," clearing the way for a melody that melds Bacharach-esque pop to folk, rock, and chamber jazz, with riveting singing from Smith and Orzabal. "Swords and Knives" melds squalling prog rock guitar (a la Robert Fripp) to Afro-Latin polyrhythms and orchestral arrangements woven through psych-pop overtones. The rave-up rocker "Year of the Knife" is loaded with effects. Its siren-like strings provide ballast for ripping, multi-tracked guitars, samples, atmospherics, punchy drums, and a soul revue chorus. Closer "Famous Last Words" opens with ambient sounds and a lone piano as Orzabal delivers a love song about mortality. Simon Phillips' drumming propels wafting strings and a chorale, before they're stripped away at close. Thanks to the duo's uncompromising stubbornness, expansive creative vision, and Dave Bascombe's final production, The Seeds of Love has dated better than either of its predecessors and is inarguably Tears for Fears' masterpiece.© Thom Jurek /TiVo

In 1999, Wilco willingly abdicated their position as one of the leading acts in the alt-country movement to dive head-first into the challenging waters of experimental pop with their album Summerteeth, and moved even further away from their rootsy origins with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born, winning the group a new and enthusiastic audience along the way. So it might amuse a number of the band's earlier fans that in many respects Wilco's sixth studio album, Sky Blue Sky, sounds like the long-awaited follow-up to 1996's Being There -- while it lacks the ramshackle shape-shifting and broad twang of that earlier album, Sky Blue Sky represents a shift back to an organic sound and approach that suggests the influence of Neil Young's Harvest and the more polished avenues of '70s soft rock. Sky Blue Sky also marks Wilco's first studio recordings since Nels Cline and Pat Sansone joined the group, and they certainly make their presence felt -- with Cline, Wilco has its strongest guitarist to date, and while his interplay with Sansone on numbers like "Impossible Germany" and "Walken" lacks the skronky muscle of his more avant-garde work of the past, it's never less than inspired and he works real wonders with Jeff Tweedy's lovely melodies. Sansone's keyboard work also shines, adding soulful accents to "Side with the Seeds" and Mellotron on "Leave Me (Like You Found Me)," as does Mikael Jorgensen's piano and organ, and overall this is Wilco's strongest album as an ensemble to date. Tweedy's vocals boast a clarity and nuance that reveals he's grown in confidence and skill as a singer, and the songs recall Summerteeth's beautiful but unsettling mix of lovely tunes and lyrics that focus on troubled souls and crumbling relationships. Between the pensive "Be Patient with Me," the lovelorn "Hate It Here," and "On and On and On"'s pledge that "we'll stay together" squared off against the resignation of "Please don't cry/We're designed to die," Sky Blue Sky isn't afraid to go to the dark places, but Tweedy and his bandmates also find plenty of beauty, inspiration, and real joy along the way, and the album's open, natural sound is an ideal match for the material. Sky Blue Sky may find Wilco dipping their toes into roots rock again, but this doesn't feel like a step back so much as another fresh path for one of America's most consistently interesting bands.© Mark Deming /TiVo

Losing Wolf, aside from the final reprise of "Lucy," but otherwise making no changes in the line-up, the Seeds followed up Tender Prey with the equally brilliant but generally calmer Good Son. At the time of its release there were more than a few comments that Cave had somehow softened or sold out, given how he was more intent on exploring his dark, cabaret pop stylings than his thrashy, explosive side. This not only ignored the constant examples of such quieter material all the way back to From Her to Eternity, but Cave's own constant threads of lyrical darkness, whether in terms of romance or something all the more distressing. This said, the softly crooning group vocals and sweet strings on the opening "Foi Na Cruz" certainly would catch some off guard. The title track itself captured the overall mood of the album, a retelling of the Bible's prodigal son story from the other son, the one who stayed at home and did what he was meant to do. The elegant, reflective "Lucy" and the staccato then sweeping "Lament" are two further high points, but the flat-out winners come dead center. "The Weeping Song," a magnificent duet between Cave and Bargeld, starts out sounding a bit like Gene Pitney's "Something's Gotta Hold of My Heart," which the Seeds covered on Pricks, before shading into its own powerful, blasted drama. "The Ship Song," meanwhile, equals if not overtakes the Scott Walker ballads Cave so clearly is inspired by, a soaring, tearjerking declaration of intense love that's simply amazing.© Ned Raggett /TiVo

There was a time not so long ago when Nick Cave revelled in the role of the dark prince of rock. Now however, buffeted by the vagaries and tragedies of life, he's grown spooky in a more understated way. As the onetime new wave rebel has aged and settled into a more sedate lifestyle, the tone and tenor of his songs has turned ever more brooding and pensive; austerity and explorations of the stark and spare have become his latest compulsions. Here on an intriguing odds 'n' sods compilation of lesser known or unreleased tracks from his recent work with his band The Bad Seeds, the quieter, more introspective Cave is showcased, expanding the portrait of the moving target he and his music will always be. "King Sized Nick Cave Blues," an unreleased track from 2014, is almost gospel. The next track "Opium Eyes," set to a rumbling beat with random demonic vibraphone notes, makes for a warlock chant. The sad, solo piano and voice-only track, "Euthanasia" segues into the full band "Life Per Se," another somber exploration with viola and loudly hummed background vocals. Both were recorded for the 2014 Skeleton Tree sessions that occurred just after the accidental death of Cave's son Arthur, an event that's had the audible effect of giving an even sadder hue to much of what Cave has written since. Musically, he has progressively settled into more lyrics slowly spoken or sung over lilting electronic backgrounds, a trend heard in "Big Dream (w/ Sky)" an unreleased track from the 2018/2019 sessions that became the album, Ghosteen. "First Bright Horses," an early version of the eventual Ghosteen track, "Bright Horses," verges on a cracked, almost Waitsian beauty. A rare duet, "Free to Walk," with Debbie Harry, from the 2009 Jeffrey Lee Pierce Sessions Project is a refreshing interlude. While Cave's music has grown hushed, his familiar angst joined to his astute ear for poetics continues to trigger lyrics that are cryptic and coolly angular. In "Accidents Will Happen" he sings, "Well, let me tell you a little more about Mabel/ She is shaped like an inverted ducks pond chair/ I roll out my tongue when she walks past/ Fix her with my famous jelly-eyed stare" and on"Steve McQueen," from the Skeleton Tree sessions, his menacing persona returns, albeit at a lower volume, as he recites: "I'm the atomizer/ I'm the vaporizer/I turn everything to crud/ I like it here in your flesh and blood." Bad Seeds partner Warren Ellis is a large part of what's heard here whether it's his violin loops that sway from side to side in "Animal X" and "Lightning Bolts" or his piano leading the way on a slow, sweeping, large forces 2019 performance of "Push The Sky Away," the title track to the Seeds' 2013 album, which was recorded as part of a concert with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Like the sessions they are drawn from, the sound and mixes heard on B-Sides and Rarities are beautifully spacious and detailed with Cave's voice seemingly in the room next to you. Especially sweet for longtime fans, this collection is more proof that Cave remains one of the current era's musical visionaries. © Robert Baird/Qobuz

B.B. King is not only a timeless singer and guitarist, he's also a natural-born entertainer, and on Live at the Regal the listener is treated to an exhibition of all three of his talents. Over percolating horn hits and rolling shuffles, King treats an enthusiastic audience (at some points, they shriek after he delivers each line) to a collection of some of his greatest hits. The backing band is razor-sharp, picking up the leader's cues with almost telepathic accuracy. King's voice is rarely in this fine of form, shifting effortlessly between his falsetto and his regular range, hitting the microphone hard for gritty emphasis and backing off in moments of almost intimate tenderness. Nowhere is this more evident than at the climax of "How Blue Can You Get," where the Chicago venue threatens to explode at King's prompting. Of course, the master's guitar is all over this record, and his playing here is among the best in his long career. Displaying a jazz sensibility, King's lines are sophisticated without losing their grit. More than anything else, Live at the Regal is a textbook example of how to set up a live performance. Talking to the crowd, setting up the tunes with a vignette, King is the consummate entertainer. Live at the Regal is an absolutely necessary acquisition for fans of B.B. King or blues music in general. A high point, perhaps even the high point, for uptown blues. © Daniel Gioffre /TiVo

With guitarist/keyboardist Roland Wolf and Cramps/Gun Club veteran Kid Congo Powers on guitar added to the ranks, along with guest appearances from old member Hugo Race, the Seeds reached 1988 with their strongest album yet, the insanely powerful, gripping Tender Prey. Rather than simply redoing what they'd already done, Nick Cave and company took their striking musical fusions to deeper and higher levels all around, with fantastic consequences. The album boldly starts out with an undisputed Cave masterpiece -- "The Mercy Seat," a chilling self-portrait of a prisoner about to be executed that compares the electric chair with the throne of God. Queasy strings from a Gini Ball-led trio and Mick Harvey's spectral piano snake through a rising roar of electric sound -- a common musical approach from many earlier Seeds songs, but never so gut-wrenching as here. Cave's own performance is the perfect icing on the cake, commanding and powerful, excellently capturing the blend of crazed fear and righteousness in the lyrics. Matching that high point turns out to be impossible for anything else on Tender Prey, but more than enough highlights take a bow that demonstrates the album's general quality. "Deanna" is another great blast from the Seeds, a garage rock-style rave-up that lyrically is everything Natural Born Killers tried to be, but failed at -- killing sprees, Cadillacs, and carrying out the work of the Lord, however atypically. The echoing, gentle-yet-rough sonics on the Blind Willie Johnson-inspired "City of Refuge" and the gentler drama of "Sugar Sugar Sugar" also do well in keeping the energy level up. On the quieter side, Cave indulges his penchant for gloomy piano-led ballads throughout, and quite well at that, with such songs as "Watching Alice," "Mercy," and the end-of-the-evening singalong "New Morning." "Sunday's Slave" has a beautifully brooding feeling to it thanks to the combination of acoustic guitar and piano, making it a bit of a cousin of Scott Walker's "Seventh Seal."© Ned Raggett /TiVo