Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Murder Ballads
While Tender Prey is probably the peak of Nick Cave's singer-songwriter career for me, Murder Ballads is easily one of the best overall productions of his career if we're talking about arrangement and sound design. You hear it especially on 'Lovely Creature', which waxes and wanes with ethereal female backing vocals over an ominous rumbling riff that makes it an instant standout to me here. I'm not the biggest fan of Nick's overtly spoken word approach as a general rule, but the stories are entertaining in doses and there's some massive chemistry going on with his backing band too.
While there are other records cut from a similar musical cloth to this that I enjoy more and I think are better albums overall (David Sylvian's Secrets Of The Beehive, Devin Townsend's Casualties Of Cool project, Dan Fogelberg's The Innocent Age) this is a great album taken on its own merits and it works very, very hard to elevate its (at times) Lynchian subject matter as much as it can.
10 out of 10
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