Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

When I lived in Ohio, I got to be friends with a guy who worked at the Jimmy John's up the road from my office. I was always either a 6 or a 6 on wheat, and it was my lunch any time I didn't pack one or couldn't deal with my packed lunch, so I guess I became easy to spot. He turned out to be pretty cool, he did a bunch of community theater and I started going to his shows and helping him pick things to go out for. He was also extremely weird (so am I) so on one trip we saw a play that involved, IIRC, someone hanging by their entrails with all of the lines in an Irish accent and rhyming cadence. The point of this story is that he was the biggest Nick Cave fan I've ever met, and he is absolutely precisely the sort of person I had envisioned Nick Cave fans being. A lot of this is a little bit too, like, depressed-in-a-dark-cave-by-the-ocean for me, but I did like this album more than some others I've heard. 3.5

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