Just stunning. Ever since The Ship Song in 1990 I wanted to hear a whole album of Nick Cave doing songs like that. With the Murder Ballads that didn't seem likely, but this is it. I can't think of many instances in the last fifteen years where one of my favourite artists has pulled one out of the bag — the feeling you get when you're in the middle of something that will be marked for years to come — but this is one such case. (If you're asking, Neil Young's Sleeps With Angels and his Greendale tour would be the others.)
Neither can I think of many albums with better opening lines than this one. It's the first song, Into My Arms, that I think of when I picture this album in my mind's ear, but listening to it again reminds me how many good songs there are on it.
I had a tape of Stuart Maconie interviewing Nick Cave on his Sunday night Radio 1 programme, at the time The Boatman's Call came out. That tape was kicking around in the door pocket of the car for almost a decade, but when I wrote the car off in a ditch last month there was only so much clutter we could salvage, and that tape has now been recycled as scrap. I digress. Cave was charming in the interview, and when Maconie put it to him that the Bad Seeds had had relatively little to do on this record, compared with others, Cave insisted that their contribution as a band had been significant. Quite right, because the arrangements are subtle, but incredibly effective. In the interview, Cave also spoke of the influence of Bob Dylan, to whom he admitted to being only a recent convert, as well as of the New Testament, having for a long time hammed up the Old Testament morality (the interventionist God of the opening line).
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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