It says something about the overall quality and consistency of Nick Cave’s musical output that you could make a case for any one of the top five or six albums I’ve ranked here as being the Bad Seeds’ best and I wouldn’t be too put out. Still, almost from the start of this undertaking, Let Love In seemed destined for the number one spot. No other album in this vast catalog matches Let Love In for the perfect balance between fire and succor, ballad and curse, ugliness and beauty, cruelty and kindness. Coming off the wild success of Henry’s Dream, Let Love In is interesting for the way in which it actually scales back the focus on Cave’s narrative gifts. This isn’t to say that the album is lyrically vapid, but rather than the storytelling arcs that dominated the last several Bad Seeds album — at least all the way back to Tender Prey — are mostly toned down in favor of supremely evocative portraits. Call them narrative snapshots, if you want. He hasn’t regressed to the surrealistic dirt-punk poetry of the Birthday Party, but instead offered up a series of meditations on love, from the grotesque to the unseemly to the counterintuitive, but all with a sensitivity and sharply attuned ear for detail — “They’ll sound a flugelhorn”; “a voice that stinks of death and vanilla”; “nailed across the doorways of the bedrooms of my dreams”; “My lady of the Various Sorrows.”

The personnel in the Bad Seeds were unchanged between Henry’s Dream and Let Love In, and the band’s intuitive communication shows through the way in which each song — many with ornate, highly involved arrangements — feels unforced, and with each piece accorded the appropriate space. Perhaps as a result of this intimacy and familiarity, the album is able to unfold in a way that gives it a thematic unity that doesn’t quite exist in any other Bad Seeds album. And honestly, this is no small feat, because it means that even such wild, raucous explosions of noise as “Jangling Jack” and “Thirsty Dog” never feel out of place alongside the gentler fare like “Ain’t Gonna Rain Anymore” and “Nobody’s Baby Now.” Whereas The Good Son was clearly a ballads record, and Henry’s Dream felt like an intentional reclamation of rock by means of responding to its softness, Let Love In moves through ballad and rocker, feedback and string cadence, gentle words and hideous, hurtful words all in their time.

But beyond whatever overblown gestalt one might care to extract from the album, Let Love In is first and foremost an album of phenomenal songs. “Loverman” is such a hulking, disgusting, lust-drenched behemoth of a song, and yet it operates according to some fairly balanced dynamics. (Dynamics which, it ought to be added, were almost entirely trampled over by Metallica’s limply crude — if well-intentioned — cover version.) With “Jangling Jack,” one can almost feel the cackle of glee rising from Cave’s glass-shard-gargling vocals, and from the lusty backing vocals. The album’s thematic unity is of course largely a product of the fact that the album begins and ends with different versions of “Do You Love Me?”

But of course, the true masterpiece of Let Love In is “Red Right Hand.” If “The Mercy Seat” is rightly one of Nick Cave’s best-known songs as a songwriter, then “Red Right Hand” deserves to be the best-known song by the Bad Seeds, bar none. (Though the words are by Cave, the music is credited to Harvey, Wydler, and Cave, so it clearly wasn’t a solo effort in that respect.) The spare, jazzy shuffle of the song, and the otherworldly groan and whorl of the organ, and the simple, matter-of-fact vocal delivery conspire to make “Red Right Hand” the scariest quiet song you’ve ever heard. Add to all of that lyrics that are just oblique enough to make the song’s meaning a point of debate rather than certainty, and one is left eternally puzzling over how one song could be so absolutely perfect. I mean, okay, maybe you can read a line like “You’re one microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan/ Designed and directed by his red right hand” without collapsing in fits of horrified awe, but if so, you are made of sterner stuff than I.

Just like “New Morning” provides such a fitting closure to Tender Prey, so does “Lay Me Low” for Let Love In (despite the fact that it’s not the closing song). The puckish yet sincere celebration of the narrator’s future death procession is an utter joy to bleat along with, and while one should be careful not to ascribe his narrator’s sentiments to the man himself, it’s pretty hard to hear Nick Cave sing “They’ll see my work in a different light, when I go” without giving it the glimmer of autobiographical suggestion.

Nearly twenty years later, and here’s why Let Love In is still Nick Cave’s finest hour: It implicates you, the listener, in the unseemly and otherworldly celebration of lust, love, life, and death. So come on – let’s go bang that big old gong together.