Nick Cave has made a cottage industry out of theatrical gloom for the past 15 years, artfully plunging into the depths of a reservoir of despair that many alternative rockers couldn't even dream of fathoming. But never before have manic elements elevated Cave's shtick to art as on Murder Ballads. In a way, the album is an author-subject synergy reminiscent of Linda Ronstadt's Canciones de Mi Padre, only Cave's realm is much, much darker, and his daddy is the mass murderer Richard Speck.

Backed again by Mick Harvey and Blixa Bargeld, Cave updates the traditional murder ballad with camp cynicism and satire, transforming the genre into a timely vehicle of catharsis. Like Enya's music, Cave's has always appealed to a select audience – you either get it or it gives you butt rash – and here he pulls no punches. "Song of Joy," the album's opening operatic dirge, seems a twisted dare designed to scare off the uninitiated.

Then the fun begins with the psychotically enhanced shriekfest "Stagger Lee" (Cave's version of the turn-of-the-century classic); a pretty and poisonous "Henry Lee," with Polly Jean Harvey; and a sublimely insidious "Lovely Creature," taking the listener on a textural roller coaster through psychosexual rage and raw sensuality. The album reaches its zenith on "Where the Wild Roses Grow," a succulent duet with Australian pop princess Kylie Minogue. Cave's character is so infatuated with Minogue's pristine nubility that he bashes her brains in, underscoring the link between sex and death.

This sort of schizoid jolie laide juxtaposition coheres Murder Ballads. "The Curse of Millhaven" is a horror-filled hoedown, buoyant but laced with enough mayhem to make the Mansonite Susan Atkins snort. The slinkster opus "O'Malley's Bar" is practically Cave's poetic masterpiece – literate, sultry and tortured. By the time the cavalcade of freaks (including Anita Lane and Shane MacGowan) abjectly signs off on Bob Dylan's "Death Is Not the End," one feels as though one has witnessed the grand finale of a deranged floor show – or at least the performance of Nick Cave's life. (RS 730)

BILL VAN PARYS