What sets Prayers On Fire slightly apart from even the earliest, most primitive of the Bad Seeds material is that everything seems locked in a constant struggle, with Cave’s vocals vying with the bass and guitars for primacy. For even as loud and violent and chaotic as the Bad Seeds were on From Her To Eternity, that chaos all felt directed toward a unified purpose, which was not always the case with the Birthday Party. Whether the ramshackle nature of the Birthday Party is ultimately attributed to intentional looseness or debauched, drunken, and drug-addled sloppiness is beside the point: Prayers On Fire is the sound of a band smartening up even as they sound ready to spit in your eye and jab a broken bottle in your gut at any perceived slight.

Though Cave takes nearly all lyric-writing duties, he and Rowland Howard again nearly share songwriting credit. The band attacks their given instruments more fiercely than ever before, but they also deploy additional instrumental textures to greater, queasier effect. Tracy Pew’s bass playing is an even thicker, more rumbling descant, and the mariachi trumpet that turns up on “Zoo-Music Girl” is a stroke of idiotic genius. Phill Calvert’s clattering drums on “Figure Of Fun” bring out the carnival thrill of the organ, and the saxophone, clarinet, and piano that show up throughout the album add just enough shading to hint at the rich sounds that would eventually be taken up by the Bad Seeds. For now, though, everything is a blunt instrument wrenched and wrangled for maximum damage.

Lyrically, Cave had yet to explore much of the dark narrative talent that would soon flower, but his imagery is consistently engrossing as he spits out epigrammatic, surreal non sequiturs. At every turn, Prayers On Fire drips with overheated yet elliptical depravity, particularly on “King Ink,” “Nick The Stripper,” “Zoo-Music Girl,” and “Yard.” His voice veers from wailing doomsayer (“Cry”) to cannibalistic snarl (“Nick The Stripper”) to flamboyant and improbably staccato melody-maker (“King Ink”), but everywhere he sounds like a man utterly possessed with a sideways death-drive, a sincere urge to push everything outward. His tangled web of lyrical self-reference gets a jump-start here, as the line “If there’s one thing in this world I desire, it’s to make love to my zoo-music girl” calls to mind the wonderfully spat imprecation on “From Her To Eternity”: “And I know that to possess her/ is therefore not to desire her…”

Some might find even more appeal in the Birthday Party on the verge of collapse, as witnessed with Junkyard, but Prayers On Fire balances controlled chaos with the sense that any song could, at any time, decide to rebel against its makers and start playing entirely on its own. It’s often a leering, slapdash, barely tuneful mess, but in the hands of such skilled savants, that makes for a glorious rock and roll eruption, and for the Birthday Party’s finest hour.