This methodology led to a few results that surprised me, with longtime favorite albums winding up lower than expected, and a handful of albums that I hadnвЂ™t mentally rated that highly at the outset steadily climbing up. It seems to me, then, that the only fair way to engage in such an exercise is to approach each album with the assumption that itвЂ™s the best one, and then see what kind of argument it can mount in its defense. By his own account, however, at least in more recent years he has approached his creative work with a dogged discipline: go to an office in the morning, sit at a desk and work, and then leave it behind at the end of the day.Дespite this current discipline, however, the wild, wooly diversity of the albums with which Cave has been involved makes this current task a daunting one, not only because of the sheer number of albums to be judged, but also because of the wretched difficulty in trying to find the proper basis for comparing albums as dramatically unlike as Junkyard and The BoatmanвЂ™s Call. Though his body of work undoubtedly has its crests and valleys, the sheer pace with which he has kept at it suggests a steely professionalism (or at least, if you prefer, the fitful compulsion of the perpetually unsatisfied). Beyond that, though, the man simply seems - to reach for an assuredly inapt word - inexhaustible. Given the scope and progression of CaveвЂ™s music and songwriting interests over the years, it can make just as much sense to mention him alongside household names like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Tom Waits as it does to mention him in the same breath as such outsider figures as Scott Walker, Michael Gira, or David Tibet. The web of connections that wend through the Bad Seeds is outrageously rich, from Blixa BargeldвЂ™s Einsturzende Neubauten, Mick HarveyвЂ™s Crime & the City Solution, and Warren EllisвЂ™ Dirty Three, to collaborations with Lydia Lunch, David TibetвЂ™s Current 93, The PoguesвЂ™ Shane Macgowan, Johnny Cash, and on and on.Д«ut of course, through it all, Cave has been the ringleader, cycling through a varied bag of vocal styles and personalities: a heroin-thin, lunging lunatic an old-fashioned balladeer and crooner a street corner prophet a sex-mad lothario a heartbroken mutterer and a roguish raconteur. This shifting group of collaborators is crucially important, because for as much as Cave is an inimitable vocalist and singular songwriter, his music has always ebbed and flowed with the varied strengths of his compatriots. The membership of the Bad Seeds has been a constantly malleable thing, with the group swapping out members and growing in size (and ability) at nearly every turn of their history. Almost before the ink was dry on the Birthday PartyвЂ™s death certificate, Cave and Birthday Party guitarist Mick Harvey had formed a new band, which, following a few embryonic name choices and live shows, would soon be christened Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds. Though the death-jazz rattle of the Birthday PartyвЂ™s post-punk burned itself out in a few short years, it was enough to relocate the band from Australia to London in search of a more fertile artistic environment. CaveвЂ™s principal notoriety begins when the Boys Next Door decided on yet another name, cranked their instruments up louder than their technical proficiency merited, and brought the Birthday Party screaming and clawing into an unsuspecting world. This band would eventually settle on the name the Boys Next Door, and release a debut album under that name in 1979. His musical history goes back even further, however, to a band formed with several fellow art students in Australia in 1973. One could do much the same for Nick Cave, if not for the inconvenient fact that, more often than not, heвЂ™s singing about all three at the same time.ДЇor the past thirty years, Nick Cave has been leading his Bad Seeds on a winding tour through the sordid backwaters and heartfelt desires of humanity.

The year 2000 saw the release of a three-disc Johnny Cash compilation with each disc bearing a one-word title indicating the thematic scopes of the chosen songs: Love, God, and Murder.

Nick cave best of download