10. The Carny
http://youtu.be/Cur4M00sMZQ In a career spent writing the darkest music this side of Norwegian death metal, Your Funeral My Trial is a strong contender for Nick Cave's darkest album. Before this we had the acerbic insanity of The Birthday Party and those early Bad Seeds releases both of which relied upon explicitly violent lyrics and intensely loud and dissonant music to unnerve. Your Funeral, My Trial, though, was the first Nick Cave album to wholly rely on a more insidious darkness, perhaps best sampled on the foreboding Stranger Than Kindness. The Carny, though, is utterly terrifying. It makes
Papa Lazarou's Pandemonium Carnival seem like It's A Small World After All. With a distressing main theme that evokes the murderous spree of a demented clown, Cave performs his vocals like a dramatic reading of Poe. And as if that weren't enough, the lyrics concern the botched attempts by a bunch of dwarves to bury a horse called Sorrow.
Nobody writes songs like this.