The fact that The Boatman’s Call ended up so high on this list quite honestly surprised even me. Part of that result is due to its fortuitous juxtaposition. If The Boatman’s Call had followed, say, The Good Son instead of Murder Ballads, it’s entirely possible that it wouldn’t have made such a stark, soul-baring impact. As it is, though, the complete about-face from the raucous, destructively brilliant death-folk of Murder Ballads to the naked, personal hurt of The Boatman’s Call still stuns like a thunderclap. This is one of the spots in Cave’s discography where it’s almost impossible to ignore biographical information, because the album’s gestation and subject matter were drawn from both the end of Cave’s marriage of six years to Brazilian journalist Viviane Carneiro and from the whirlwind romance and bust-up of Cave’s brief relationship with PJ Harvey.

As a result, The Boatman’s Call is full of sorrow, anger, and self-loathing, but the songs always present those emotions with such direct, head-on honesty and guilelessness that one never feels manipulated. This is an album utterly without affectation or mythology, and Cave’s voice throughout is as bare and unadorned as the sparse instrumental accompaniments. On that note, The Boatman’s Call very often sounds like a solo album, with a lovelorn Nick Cave sitting at the piano, eyes half-closed in purgation of still stinging wounds. But the Bad Seeds are here, of course, as they always are. What impresses consistently throughout this album is the great pains to which the band has gone to appear almost invisible. Listen, for example, to the delicate, almost back-sliding plod of “People Ain’t No Good,” where everyone but Cave seems almost reluctant to even make it to the next beat.

Though Cave is in full confessional mode throughout the album, his past lyrical preoccupations haven’t quite deserted him, and thus his musings on lost love are frequently filtered through a searching, uncertain religious framework, as on “Into My Arms” and “Brompton Oratory.” You could almost think of The Boatman’s Call as Cave’s Blood On The Tracks, but that’s reductive, and more than a little unfair to the scope of both albums. Warren Ellis was, by this point, a full-time member of the band, and although his contributions, like those of all the Bad Seeds, are vanishingly subdued, his violin adds a bluegrass tinge to “West Country Girl.” That song helps to form one of several intra-album connections with “Black Hair,” the song that follows and ends with the crushing simplicity of the lyric “Today she took a train to the west.” The music on “Black Hair” is equally simplistic, but is hauntingly marked by the inescapable melancholy of Mick Harvey’s bass organ (the sound of which always brings to mind, for me, the equally heart-breaking sounds of the harmonium-led Current 93 album Sleep Has His House).

The album’s true revelation lies in its starkness and precision. There’s nothing here beyond the barest skeletal trappings of an arrangement, leaving the focus on Cave’s wounded verse, which can coil and strike with a brutally raw and painful impact, as on “Where Do We Go Now But Nowhere?” The album’s twin masterpieces, however, must be the heart-stoppingly perfect love song “Into My Arms,” and the wrenching lament of “Far From Me,” which opens with heroic, Christ-like selflessness, but ends with asking the departed lover “Did you ever care for me?” The album’s sentiments are so sharp and plain that it can feel almost voyeuristic, like listening in to the interior monologue of heartbroken self-abnegation. It stings like salt in an open sore, and yet, paradoxically, the idyllic beauty of the music makes The Boatman’s Call a bruising salve in turbulent times. It’s a mysterious, magical record, and a stunning triumph.