Nick Cave & The Bad SeedsMurder Ballads

Candlelit one moment, blood-soaked the next, a whole album about people who kill and get killed. Cave's baritone narrates over swelling strings and churchy organ like noir staged in a cathedral. "Where the Wild Roses Grow" turns a riverside courtship with Kylie Minogue into murder; "Henry Lee" hushes to acoustic chemistry with PJ Harvey; then "Stagger Lee" swaggers in profane and menacing, and "O'Malley's Bar" stretches a barroom massacre across fourteen blackly comic minutes. Gallows humor and operatic dread, beautiful and grotesque. Cave's best gateway, no contest.