HENRY'S DREAM

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: Nick Cave (vocals, harmonica, keyboards); Mick Harvey (guitar, keyboards, vibraphone, drums); Blixa Bargeld (guitar); Conway Savage, Martin P. Casey (piano); Thomas Wydler (drums, percussion). Additional personnel: Conway Savage (vocals); Dennis Karmazyn (cello); Bruce Dukov, Barbara Porter (violin). Engineers: Chuck Johnson, Cohen, Dave Cook. HENRY'S DREAM is perhaps the most fully realized of all Cave's albums. On it, he achieves the perfect balance between his lush, poetic sensibilities and his feral, unfettered rock & roll id. Most of the guitar work is acoustic, but there's no lack of momentum as the band drives harder than ever. Cave's grisly Cohenesque lyric talents are at their peak here. Each song is like a short horror story, or a rock equivalent of Rod Serling's NIGHT GALLERY. The unrelentingly gruesome imagery of tunes like "Papa Won't Leave You Henry" is hammered home even further by the pounding arrangements. Even when things settle down, as on the folkie ballad "Loom of the Land," there's a barely veiled undercurrent of danger in the air. HENRY'S DREAM is full of some of Cave's finest songcraft, making a case for him as the gloomy bard of '90s alt-rock.

• Genre: Pop
• Format: Vinyl
• Released: 05/12/2015