GRINDERMAN - Grinderman 2

Nick Cave. Really what the hell can you say about Nick Cave at this point? He is like the Clint Eastwood of rock and roll; the perennial bad-ass for the thinking man. He is an inch away from the legendary status of Iggy Pop, and if we are honest his music has been massively more consistent and groundbreaking throughout the years. This is the guy who gave us the brutality of the Birthday Party in the early 80s followed by the even more spectacular post-punk blues of the Bad Seeds, one of the greatest acts in the history of rock music. Period. And for the record, I'll fight any man to the death who says differently. His is a dark universe of indifferent and angry gods, lovers and murderers (who are often one and the same) and generally bad mutherfuckers; bad in the Queen's English sense of the word, as well as in terms of street cred. Even his ballads sound predatory for the most part, like a wolf meticulously preparing to overtake a more than willing victim. His characters are always striving toward either salvation or annihilation, and as a result his music and lyrics are laden with a romanticism. Like Johnny Cash before him, he is a prince of darkness striving for light, but simply can't quite get there because of some internal flaw put there by nature, nurture, god or the devil, depending on your reading of existence. To quote his tailor's assistant (and he is impeccably dressed like the devil in a Sunday hat) he is "terrifying, but always polite and courteous." In short he is Nick fucking Cave.

Having said all of that Cave took the Bad Seeds down a very different and, admittedly, less satisfactory road beginning with "The Boatman's Call" in 1997. He moved away from dark and violent narratives toward confessional ballads throughout the aughts until the advent of Grinderman in 2006. Consisting of Bad Seeds' members Warren Ellis (also of Dirty Three fame), Martyn Casey and Jim Sclavunos, Grinderman wasn't just a return to form for Cave, it was a fucking rebirth. Nearly as raw as the early Bad Seeds work, the four-man set-up featuring Cave on the most rudimentary primitive rhythm guitar was dirty, dangerous and raw as fuck. It also seethed with evil, so much glorious evil. Some critics called it Cave's mid-life crises, I prefer to think of it Cave's mid-life gift. Cave proved that mid-life didn't have to devolve into a cliche of cheating on your wife and buying a sports car, it could also be an opportunity to become an authentic individual again with the wisdom that a younger version of yourself simply couldn't begin to approximate. Grinderman kind of reminds me of a Louis CK quote: "I know too much about life to have any optimism because I know even if it's nice, it's going to lead to shit." After years of Cave's 'niceness' that pessimism and shit was Grinderman. Yet, in typical Cave fashion he played the part of predator, not victim, and it was glorious.

Grinderman not only featured Cave in the role he was born to play, but it also re-energized the Bad Seeds, who produced "Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!", their best album in over a decade in the year following Grinderman's debut album. "Lazarus" was full of the vim and vigor that made Grinderman so exhilarating.

Now Grinderman has returned with a follow up album that mixes the rawness of their debut with the diversity and semi-polish of the Bad Seeds' "Lazarus." The band tears through the first three dirty blues tracks with a coiled intensity that explodes during choruses wherein Cave howls his tales of sex and horror with a punk ferocity. Each song provides the type of visceral thrill that only an artist like Cave can invoke. There is a well-earned seedy danger to these songs that is so sorely missing from today's younger artists. The Black Keys and Jack Black's various projects are nice and all, but no one does this kind of twisted raw virile punk-inflected blues like Cave and his band.

Following the album's front-loaded rockers, the band slows things down for the slow burning epic "When My Baby Comes." Initially reminiscent of the Bad Seeds' work, full of sorrowful strings and lacerating guitar stabs, the song eventually culminates into a bombastic blues-laden finale that reflects the horrors of the track's lyrics, which paint a picture of personal and collective annihilation, institutionalization and delusion. Like I said, the White Stripes this isn't. It's one of the album's most captivating and fully realized tracks, combining the Bad Seeds' years of professional refinement with Grinderman's stripped to the bone approach.

The minor, almost freak-folk, "What I Know" follows before the band flexes it's muscle again with the stellar 'but this goes to 11' "Evil!" Over a chorus of voices screaming the titular word, Cave belts out his tale of obsession as Sclavunos' explosive jazz drums do battle with Ellis' violent guitar attacks while Casey attempts to keep them both balanced on the same axis with a bassline that acts as the song's sole backbone. It's an absolute barn burner of a song and one of Cave's best in years.

The album slows down again for the swagger of "Kitchenette" which contains one of the year's best verses:

What's this husband of yours given to you/Oprah Winfrey on a plasma screen/And a brood of jug-eared buck-toothed imbeciles/The ugliest kids I've ever seen

Kicking against the pricks indeed. That's the kind of invective that made Cave in the first place, and it's a welcome return to form. In typical contradictory Cave fashion he follows up "Kitchenette" up with the album's most uplifting, sincerely romantic track "Palaces of Montezuma" which recounts all the things he promises to deliver to his lover including "Miles Davis the black unicorn" and "a custard-coloured super-dream of Ali McGraw and Steve McQueen." With it's northern soul backing vocals and light-infused melody it's initially the most jarring song on the record, simply because it stands out starkly against the overwhelmingly violently dark tracks that populated the rest of the album. After repeat listens, though. the track emerges as a highlight, even if it does sound like the kind of inspired grand gesture of love that Bono used to write, and would probably kill an African child for just to get a taste of that kind of magic again.

The album ends with the psychedelic blues of "Bellringer Blues," bringing "Grinderman 2" to a proper shadowy close. Once the album ends, it's hard not to hit play again and again, and in fact that is what I have been doing going on a week straight now, and not only because I wanted to write an honest review of this record, but because this is Cave's best release in over a decade. It tops the first Grinderman record and is much more of a return to form to the classic Bad Seeds' sound, or at least attitude, than "Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!" Cave seems to have been working through some things over the past decade, and expressing it in a more introverted version of the Bad Seeds along the way, but "Grinderman 2" is proof that the wolf is back and he has no hesitation about going in for the kill and making it as bloody as possible.

Wheeler says: "If Nick Cave were the leader of a religious cult, I would totally join...and I would drink the Kool-Aid."

"Heathen Child" NSFW and batshit crazy in an awesome way video


Awesome live version of "Worm Tamer"


"Evil!"


"When My Baby Comes"