NO Best Of selection can ever be entirely satisfactory, by necessity being subjective, judgemental and incomplete.

As if to prove the point, Mute Records' celebration of 30 years of Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds comes in myriad forms, one with 21 tracks on CD or triple vinyl, another as a deluxe edition with 45 tracks, a DVD and 48-page booklet, and then a super-duper Super Deluxe collector's version with a hardcover book.

The Bad Seeds story began in 1984 after Cave blew out the candles on The Birthday Party, and so issuing a Best Of that ends in 2014, 30 years later, is a neat and tidy finishing line for a compilation, except that the Nick Cave story did not stop neatly and tidily in 2014.

Alas, far from it. His 15-year-old twin son Arthur died in July 2015, falling 60ft from the Ovingdean Gap cliff in Brighton, and it is this loss that forms the starting point of Andrew Dominik's documentary film One More Time With Feeling, which followed Cave when he grappled with making The Bad Seeds' 2016 album, Skeleton Tree. As the film makes clear, Cave does not make a distinction between making records before and after Arthur's death, only that grief keeps striking him like a stretched-till-you-have-to-release elastic band.

Nevertheless, Lovely Creatures successfully distils the first 30 years, the changing line-ups, the equal adeptness at heart-rending balladry (whether murder ballads or a love more beautiful) and the bleeding heart raging at the moon. The 21-track new version shares ten numbers from the Australian Cave's first Best Of in 1998 – the likes of The Ship Song, Straight To You, Red Right Hand and Into My Arms – but later works such as 2002's Love Letter, 2008's Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! and 2013's Jubilee Street and Higgs Boson Blues are lovelier creatures in their own right.

Best value is to be found in the 45-track selection: a Cave of treasures indeed.