After whatever hellish summoning unleashed such a torrent of gruesome thoughts all over Tender Prey, it’s more than a little jarring to see the cover art of The Good Son, with several little girls in delicate dresses gathered around Nick Cave playing a grand piano. Frankly, the musical transition is more than a little jarring as well, because The Good Son is, for the first time in Cave’s career, an entire album’s worth of ballads. His lyrical themes remain dark and troubled, to be sure, but the whole album is rounded, stuffed with ornamental string accompaniment, and sees Cave singing in as close an approximation to sincerity as any devotee had yet heard in him.

This hardly means that the album is a saccharine failure. In fact, for the way in which it fully embraces its ambition to be pretty and delicate, it succeeds mightily where Your Funeral… My Trial floundered and felt forced. And, in fairness, it’s not that every single moment of The Good Son sighs and floats on a cloud. The title track impresses for how well it balances the lilt and sorrow of its chorus with the driving energy of the verses, and “The Weeping Song” is similarly successful for how much open, negative space it leaves in its verses. Nevertheless, nearly every song soars on a chorus that embraces simple turns of phrase and easy melodies.

Of course, after a full album’s worth of such gentility, a little punch in the nose here and there might have been welcome. What it means, however, is that the songs which deviate from the formula even slightly register as outliers, from the sparse, whispered “Lament” to the hard-driving chorus of “The Witness Song,” the latter of which in some ways anticipates some of the developments brought to glorious fruition on Abbatoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus. Without delving too much into personal biography, the gentler approach of this album, coupled with the unique (at this point) fact that, with the exception of the music for “Lucy,” every song here was written entirely by Cave, suggests that the man may have in fact exorcised some of his own demons, just as the preceding album personified them so vividly. The Good Son remains a beguiling album and a welcome breath of fresh air from the stern intensity of the albums on either side of it. If you had written it off as lightweight fluff, it might just be time for a revisitation.