The Good Son

While its predecessor, Tender Prey, features some of Cave’s most iconic songs — “The Mercy Seat,” “Deanna” — it’s incoherent as an album. But things got back on track with The Good Son, a relatively disarmed collection of songs, gentle and steeped in longing. “The Weeping Song” is, perhaps, the album’s pinnacle, a devastating duet between Cave and guitarist Blixa Bargeld that’s still deeply affecting, decades later; Cave’s recent relocation to Brazil, to be with his then-partner, has not so much ‘lightened’ the mood of his songs, as given them greater emotional depth, and he’s now able to embrace a more understated, denuded melancholy — it’s the beginning of Cave’s long, complex process of whittling his song back to the bone, a process he’d complete with 1997’s The Boatman’s Call.