Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

Let Love In (1994)

'Red Right Hand' opens with a churning organ figure that became one of rock's most recognizable riffs — menacing, hypnotic, and definitively Cave. The album marks the mature form of the Bad Seeds' sound: dark cabaret arrangements of obsession and violence, held together by Cave's baritone and Mick Harvey's precise orchestrations. It is the pivot in Cave's catalog, darker and more confrontational than what came before and the direct foundation for the literary murder-ballad phase that followed.

Sleeve notes

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

Let Love In · 1994

Nick Cave arrived from Melbourne with the Birthday Party, one of the most genuinely extreme bands in post-punk — gothic noise-blues that resembled nothing else and made almost no concessions to listenability. When the Birthday Party imploded in 1983, Cave formed the Bad Seeds with Mick Harvey and Blixa Bargeld, and began the second act of one of rock's great careers. From Her to Eternity (1984), The Firstborn Is Dead (1985), Tender Prey (1988) — each album drew on American gothic, Delta blues, Old Testament violence, and a kind of literary excess that Cave shared with very few of his contemporaries.

What distinguished Cave from the merely transgressive was craft: as the albums accumulated, the songwriting became more intricate, the arrangements more purposeful, the character studies more fully inhabited. The Boatman's Call (1997) stunned people who thought they knew him by presenting something almost bare — piano songs, a decimated relationship, a quiet that was more devastating than anything louder. The Bad Seeds' forty-year arc, still continuing, remains one of the most sustained artistic achievements in rock.