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Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds ranked

Because I'm over the moon with Skeleton Tree and am in a current state of breathing Nick Cave at the moment. Bad Seeds LP exclusive, sorry Birthday Party, sorry Boys Next door, sorry Grinderman, you know I love y'all. Ditto B-Sides & Rarities
16Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
Nocturama

The only more or less take it or leave it album he's got. It certainly isn't bad (although I've always had a hard time appreciating the reach-exceeds-its-grasp nature of closing epic Babe, I'm On Fire), the album seems more affable filler than standout, a dynamic notably flipped in the rest of his work - in the itself rare instance any "filler" is present at all. He Wants You is wonderful, though.
15Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
From Her to Eternity

The only Bad Seeds album that leaves me feeling a bit of an outsider - there's a palpable unrest, sometimes fury in the tracks. And it has the clever manipulations of literature and musical history that marks so much of his career. But listening to From Her to Eternity, I feel as one at a museum - watching all these elements unfold behind glass, rather than wrapping around me, blotting out the very light. The emotions are evident, but they don't always directly translate. From Her to Eternity doesn't wrap me into its warped world.
14Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
Kicking Against the Pricks

As so many have said, this album feels like an inevitability. Cave's fascination with covers, the reworkings of history into new understandings of the present are some of the clearest elements of his early career. But an album entirely composed of unoriginals in a certain sense seems to negate what makes his covers so interesting on other records - the tracks themselves are wonderful, but they don't cohere into a solid monolith the way every single other Bad Seeds record does.

The present is only comprehensible through an understanding of the past. In a certain sense, this is what his covers do on other records, twisting words long loved and held dear, music that shaped Nick Cave as both artist and man - finally yelled out as an expression of his own core. But without that surrounding core, the covers don't always take on that fascinating new context. So Kicking Against the Pricks becomes an album more interesting than overly affecting.
13Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!

Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! is relentlessly groovy, remarkably fun, endlessly playable, and perpetually in the moment. It truly sounds like a party album, with endlessly clever stories woven from different story threads ranging from the opening resurrection of Lazarus to the concluding Odysseus stuck in a contemporary wandering ennui. But it never really hits much of an emotional core - for something as viscerally rhythmic as the album gets, it always ends up feeling a tad cerebral and affected in its intent. So while it may be one of the least affecting Bad Seeds albums, it's never less than entertaining. A veritable foot-stomper that is content to ride a groove for all it's worth and pulls it off marvelously.
12Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
Your Funeral...My Trial

Try as I might, I can't remove Your Funeral...My Trial from outside the umbrella of The Carny. A near spoken word, deeply unsettling and ambiguous portrait of a travelling circus forsaken in the rain by its central figure. The track is less explicitly violent than most of Cave's more disturbing fare, but with the sparse, haunted carousel of instrumentation and unsettling sensory portraits, it is overwhelmed by the haunting stench of death. It's a masterstroke of a track, but the remainder of the album's very solid work in comparison winds up feeling like a sort of embryonic preparation for its own evolution into the masterwork that would follow.
11Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
Murder Ballads

The closest Cave has to a gimmick album. The stories are by turns funny, gleefully twisted, sinister, mournful. But by the concept they never seem to truly transcend their schematic origin. These feel first and foremost like fictions without the sense of the underlying personality of Cave himself. Which is to say his personality as a storyteller is always present, but the emotional human core is rather absent. Cave often used his stories to add a sort of structure to examine his own life while still allowing a mask with which to hide his presence. But there is always the sense of the man beneath. Murder Ballads doesn't have the desperate man. So the stories are visceral (particularly when they go for the aforementioned sinister element - Lovely Creature is terrifying for its understated murderous protagonist, and perhaps the most interesting song on the album both lyrically and sonically), but never leave much of a lasting emotional impact.
10Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
The Good Son

The Good Son is a consistently strong album that aside from a few massively successful high water marks never seems to feel more than a consistently strong album - which, of course, is only a criticism in relation to the overall quality of Cave and his Bad Seeds compatriots. At the time, it felt like a drastic change, but retrospect sees it like a trial run for the naked emotionality of The Boatman's Call, but that still holds to the signifiers of Cave's work at the time. But where the album truly stands out are the middle album high of The Weeping Song and The Ship Song - the former with its fascinating vocal interplay of Cave and Bargeld that eventually builds to its dual hymnal Chorus atop a bed of handclaps and hollow percussive thumps. If The Good Son is an attempt to strip back the band's style, the Weeping Song takes this to its most extreme, and is all the better for it. The latter, on the other hand, rides its strong melodic line into a shamelessly melodramatic emotional high.
9Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus

Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus feels like an eruption. Less than two years after its lackluster predecessor, and following the departure of avant garde extraordinaire Blixa Bargeld, the record is a staunch refusal to be contained by its context. Get Ready For Love bursts out the gate swinging with a whirlwind with an instantly insistent drumbeat, cacophonous guitars, pelting Gospel choir, and Nick Cave delivering his signature cumbersomely verbose lyrics in his signature snarl. For nearly 45 minutes it refuses to let the energy die down, whether on the bursts of noise of Hiding All Away or the aggressively melodic hooks of 1-2 punch There She Goes My Beautiful World and Nature Boy. The energy begins to subside, and for a moment struggles to find itself, before settling into the equally emotional groove that will see the album storm out on another high with the melancholy but resolute exuberance of O Children.
8Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
The Boatman's Call

Calling The Boatman's Call a break-up record seems to do it a disservice. It is not about that single point in time. It's focus is not on the fallout. If anything, it feels like a eulogy to years of love that are no longer present, but far from lost. There is little anger to be found here. Instead, it is by turns a pensive reflection, a regretful analysis of mistakes made, a bittersweet ponderance marked by a half smile that doesn't quite reach the eyes; an attempt to once more find the ground ripped out from beneath. The soft touch of a hand beneath a lime tree is just as clear as the absence of that hand. The emotion might be absent in the moment, but how can anyone say it is absent?
7Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
The Firstborn Is Dead

The Firstborn Is Dead is an interesting record. Tupelo, is, of course, one of the best songs in music's greatest career. Tupelo is a great black storm cloud sweeping across a mountaintop as you stand alone, helpless before the power that perhaps hasn't arrived yet - but is coming. Is inescapable.

The tracklist doesn't crescendo, however; it recedes into a shambling dusty blues stomp. It has no less character than the magnificent opener, but the rapid change is handled as a sort of bait and switch that appear in microcosm at several more points across the album - crescendos that seem about to arrive that pull themselves back at the last second to reset. As a result, it is an album marked by a pronounced omnipresent tension. But alongside this brilliantly structured energy, the songs themselves are the clearest personification of Cave's outsider fascination with the mythos of the American West that manifests itself in different forms across his career, whether in music or literature.
6Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
Push The Sky Away

For the second time in his career, Nick uses the void following a significant (and potentially catastrophic) Bad Seeds exit on the heels of a rather stylistically complacent record to instead push ahead into uncharted and thrilling territory. But where Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus saw him exploring the most maximalist booming record of his career, Push the Sky Away sees Nick take the opposite path. If the latter feels like a conscious affirmation of artistic intent, this one feels more like an acceptance that he doesn't have to prove anything to anyone. And so it casts itself loose from Harvey's confident guitar and embraces Warren Ellis' more contained, lush atmospherics. The result is one of the most enigmatic, ethereal, and ultimately beautiful records in his career, yet one that still is submerged in unease, merely a more resigned, mature take. If youth is marked by the violent, desperate struggle against the darkness of life, here are the first steps towards imperfect peace.
5Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
Let Love In

Let Love In is demonic and harrowing. Cave's most vitriolic, spittle drenched howl of murdered tourists, Lovecraftian shadow figures, and the sort of people that stand outside seedy motel rooms in the middle of the night looking for the room that left the door unlocked or the blinds undrawn. It's an uncomfortable, compulsive listen that paints an entire world marred by the pervasive and incorrigible seediness of a back alley 4am bar.
4Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
Henry's Dream

Nick at his storytelling best. Every bit as funny as the over the top Murder Ballads (perhaps more-so, with the snarling drunken anger-plea of Brother, My Cup is Empty). It has none of the sprawling storytelling epics that mark many of his records. It goes back on The Good Son's hints at emotional piano balladry with a sonic gut punch that only relents on a couple tracks (the spookily ethereal Christina the Astonishing), where even the deeply romantic ballads Straight to You and Loom of the Land portray love as a near Biblical sort of apocalypse, all consuming and beyond human control or understanding. It is this that is at the essence of Cave's music - human feeling as something instinctual, and beyond entire comprehension. Henry's Dream is the clearest expression of this, a massive eruption of not-quite-grasped feelings. Anger that masks fear, fear that masks love, love that masks anger. Nothing is entirely what it seems to be.
3Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
No More Shall We Part

Cave's most ambitious record to date. Continuing with the newfound superficial sonic pull back experimented with first on The Good Son and fine-tuned with The Boatman's Call, No More Shall We Part begins adding back the layers of melodic and ideological Complexity present on Cave's more aggressive work, without losing the fragile vulnerability. With some of his most poetically inscrutable lyrics and harmonies between vocal and instrument that weave together, sometimes in perfect sync and sometimes playing off each other in fascinating counterpoint, No More Shall We Part utilizes the sonic consistency of its predecessor to establish a sort of breathless excitement. It is an album packed with surprises - the cacophony that closes The Sorrowful Wife. The a cappella choral fade out of Hallelujah. The almost unnoticeable build of Oh My Lord that, almost invisible from second to second gradually builds from a softly resigned introduction to its swirling anxious conclusion.
2Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
Skeleton Tree

The fact that is was released, like, yesterday, is insignificant when the music is so consumed at its core with the weight of trauma and loss that breathes in every fiber of this record. Listening to Skeleton Tree feels like laying helpless on the ground as an invisible weight pins you to the floor. On paper, its stark borderline electronic minimalism should feel almost drifting and fleeting, but in practice every effects pedal throb, every scrape of Warren Ellis' bow against violin strings, and every needle-sharp line of Cave's is a new punch to the gut. Never before have I had such an emotional response to an album on first listen, or the second, or the tenth.
1Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
Tender Prey

Easily the biggest grower in his catalogue for me. Aside from the opening two tracks, the majority of the record didn't make much of a first impression. Only with repeated listens did it begin to reveal its layers - disturbing stories, lovelorn rhapsodies, and character studies delving so far past the surface it reaches the point at which the subconscious just barely bubbles to the surface of awareness. Blues bar piano mingles with post punk snarl and nods to the European avant-garde movement, all underscoring the focused yet rambling poetics of an occasionally psychopathic beat poet. It's twisted, it's beautiful, it's harrowing, it's sad, it's angry in a desperate sort of way. In short, it is the essence of Cave's music and bursts at the seams with a wealth of ideas that shouldn't be able to fit in an album ten times it's length. It is every emotion capable of human expression at its most vulnerable.

A synthesis of music's history and its bold steps into the future.
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