Nick Cave is an odd artist. Never in music has there ever been a performer so charmingly terrifying. His career with The Bad Seeds is a long and illustrious one, and often wallows around in giant pools of darkness, focusing on grim subjects and macabre ideas. Recent output from the band has seen a reinvigorated outfit rumble through their familiar territory with great gusto – fuelled in part by Cave’s wonderfully disgusting Grinderman side project – but nowhere is the sense of pervading darkness more evident than on 1988’s Tender Prey.

At the time of the release it was heaped with critical acclaim, although a lot of this seemed to be fired directly at the album opener, “The Mercy Seat.” Opening with a track that is over seven minutes long looks brave on paper. What brave actually is, is opening with a slow, laborious, atonal, disturbing, seven minute long song about a prisoner on death row that compares the electric chair to the throne of God. To then follow this up with a tune in which our narrator is cut from his dead mother’s womb with a Stanley knife is nothing if not tenacious. This article cannot add anything to the myriad things written about “The Mercy Seat,” but sufficed to say, like those videos that circulate the internet and feature bodily harm or a particularly abhorrent sexual act, and often both, once you have heard the song it certainly won’t be leaving your consciousness any time soon. It is pervasive and depressing and utterly compelling, hypnotising the listener before giving way to the lurching vaudeville of “Up Jumped The Devil”. This one-two punch of grimy insidiousness is a devastatingly effective way of opening the record, and doesn’t so much set the listener up for a fall as much as it just eliminates the floor beneath them.

There are quieter and tenderer moments on the record, however, and the darkness of the first two tracks fades away as “Deanna” kicks in, the track that most resembles a pop song. By the time “Watching Alice” drifts pasts its intro the music becomes far more palatable and generally agreeable as Cave returns to what many know him for – his haunting piano ballads. It’s sombre and poignant, and underneath the light veneer bubbles darkness, which Cave handles with deft lyrics and masterful turns of phrase. This drastic change in mood could have gone awry in anybody else’s hands, but on this record it’s dealt with in a respectful way, never assuming that the listener won’t be able to keep up as the mood shifts across the entire album. “Mercy” is sleazy and brooding, “Sunday’s Slave” growls unsettlingly and “Slowly Goes The Night” is as close as The Bad Seeds get to sounding sweet, but everything retains an underlying darkness, leading to the groups most cohesive album since their debut – a fact left unchanged until 2008’s Dig, Lazarus. Dig!!!

There are better Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds records and, indeed a few years later they would produce their best record of that era, 1994’s Let Love In, only surpassed by return to form, Abattoir Blues/Lyre Of Orpheus a decade later, but Tender Prey is by far their most cohesive and gloriously strange record. An example of an incredible lyricist working at the peak of his powers, backed by one of the most sensationally interesting bands ever to record music.