Nick Cave

The Best of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds is a compilation album by Australian alternative rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, released on May 11, 1998.In order to decide the track listing, Cave asked each of the Bad Seeds, past and present, to choose their favourite tracks from the ten albums—their lists would then be discussed until a final list was produced. In the end, only guitarist and founding Bad Seed Mick Harvey bothered, and it is his listing, unchanged, that makes up The Best Of.

Plenty of artists have built careers out of writing about death, but only a tiny handful have shown the capacity to honestly and eloquently write about grief. Nick Cave knows more than a bit about grief, and he's been willing to stare into that particular abyss, doing so with a particularly keen focus on 2013's Push the Sky Away and 2016's Skeleton Tree, the latter partially informed by the death of his teenage son in 2015. Grief is hardly the only emotion that Cave and his ensemble the Bad Seeds explores on 2019's Ghosteen, but a sense of loss and a heavy heart permeates these songs like a thick fog, as well as the bonds of family and how they can bring us together and keep us apart…

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds are back after a five-year break with their new album Wild God! Across ten tracks, the band dances between convention and experimentation, taking left turns and detours that enhance the rich imagery and emotion in Cave's heartfelt narratives. There are moments that fondly recall the Bad Seeds' past, but they are fleeting and only serve to add another facet to the band's relentless and restless forward momentum. Nick Cave says of the album: "It bursts out of the speaker, and I get swept up with it. It's a complicated record, but it's also deeply and joyously infectious."

Nick Cave is an artist who has never shied away from exploring the darker side of the human experience, often in broadly gothic strokes on his early albums but with a growing degree of nuance and compassion as Cave and his work matured. But a very real and deeply painful tragedy was visited on Cave while he was working on his 16th solo album, Skeleton Tree. His 15-year-old son Arthur Cave died when he fell from a cliff in July 2015, and while the writing and recording was already underway when the youngster suffered his accident, the grief and pain of loss Cave felt is palpable throughout this album. Skeleton Tree is relatively modest in scale – it runs just 40 minutes, the cover artwork is minimal, and the music lacks the dramatic, grand-scale arrangements of Cave's albums of the 21st century.

Nick Cave finally gives the dedicated fans what they've desired for years (and have probably amassed in various guises in shoddy bootlegs): an official career-spanning cataloging of the various Bad Seeds odds and ends on three CDs. There are 56 tracks compiled here…