I see this criticism a lot, and I think it's worth discussing. There's certainly a lot of theatrical artifice in Cave's music, and many of his songs are character-driven narratives, but I'm not sure that this is a problem, necessarily. Songwriters like Tom Waits and David Bowie get away with this all the time —…

I'll probably catch some flack for this, but Murder Ballads has always seemed like a goofy novelty record to me, honestly. That's not to say it's a bad album, but I don't think it's nearly as good as the rest of their '90s output — it just feels too inconsequential. It was the first Bad Seeds album that I bought,…