Your Funeral… My Trial is the first Bad Seeds album to really delight and revel in restraint. Nowhere is this clearer than one of the album’s high points, the Blixa Bargeld composition “Stranger Than Kindness,” where Cave’s dour vocals weave and float, and the majority of the musical foreground is taken up by rich depths of Bargeld’s multiple guitar tracks, leaving Harvey’s drums to barely register. The album was initially recorded as two separate EPs, but the original Mute CD version combines them together and alters the track order. (The 2009 remastered and reissued version restores the song order from the original double EP format.)

As evidence of the ability of the Bad Seeds to excel at delicacy just as at savagery, Your Funeral… My Trial is interesting, but the band would later master this same skill, and as a result, much of the album feels a bit too flat, particularly compared to the dynamism of the albums that immediately surround it. The songs move pleasantly enough, and even with a sort of grace, but there’s not enough contrast to separate songs like “She Fell Away,” “Jack’s Shadow,” and “Your Funeral… My Trial.”

Still, to give credit where it’s due, the album shows Cave improving on his ability to craft focused, parsimonious stories with his lyrics. This doesn’t mean he resorts to flat-footed plainness, though, as his lyrics retain a suggestive, poetic slant even as they bring entire worlds into being with just a few spare verses. The best evidence of all of these combined strengths is “The Carny,” which is undoubtedly the album’s standout song, not just for how much at odds with the rest of the album it is, but for the delirious, perfectly evocative carnival atmosphere of its instrumentation, and the haunted terseness of its seasick waltz tempo.

Emblematic of the missed opportunity of this album is the supremely lewd “Hard On For Love.” Cave’s lyrics are at lascivious, blasphemous heights (or is that depths?) not yet seen, and yet the music never quite musters the requisite heave and swagger that his reference to what one assumes is a woman’s labia thus — “He leadeth me like a lamb to the lips/ Of the mouth of the valley of the shadow of death” — would seem to necessitate.