Henry's Dream

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Nick Cave has always packed his albums with vivid characters and hair-raising tales of sin and retribution. Even so, 1992’s <i>Henry’s Dream</i> was so full of action and passion that it made most novels seem skimpy by comparison. Produced by longtime Neil Young collaborator David Briggs, Cave’s seventh album with The Bad Seeds captured the frontman at the peak of his powers as he performed a bounty of blues-punk sea shanties, explosive country-fried ragers, and fiery sagas of biblical-scale conflicts. The most seemingly placid offerings—like “Christina the Astonishing,” an eerie tale of a 12th-century saint—still seethed with the wilder energy that coursed through early Bad Seeds efforts. Yet rather than revisit those former glories, Cave and hardy companions like Mick Harvey and Blixa Bargeld combined that unruly quality with the ambitious, more melodic sensibility of 1990’s softer-hearted <i>The Good Son</i>, the first album Cave made since beginning addiction treatment and moving to Brazil. Delivered with the fervor and grandeur of a post-punk Conway Twitty, “Straight to You” is one of many songs here to anticipate the scope and sweep of the exquisite murder balladry that would carry him through the ’90s and beyond.

via Apple Music