Grinderman
5/5
It’s hard not to smell conspiracy in Grinderman. Think about it: Nick Cave unleashes his primal rock side after over a decade of increased musical theatricality, forming a power quartet whose musical pedigree evokes The Birthday Party and is made up entirely out of fellow Bad Seeds – Martyn P Casey, Jim Sclavunos and Warren Ellis – but, significantly, doesn’t include Mick Harvey. And then what happens? After one more Bad Seeds disc, and more than two decades at Cave’s side, Harvey bails. Was Grinderman designed to force Mick’s hand? Was it a snide message from Cave to his former foil to demonstrate that his new employees can do whatever his old partners could? It’s a tantalising (and completely unsubstantiated) theory, but, if so, Grinderman is one of the best-sounding backlashes in musical history.
First thing to note is that Grinderman 2 is about a hundred times better than 2007’s self-titled debut. In fact – and whisper it quietly – it’s also a good deal better than the last few Bad Seeds albums. Cave has been liberated from his sonorous late-period croon, and sounds loose and dangerous again. And shifting from piano to guitar – an instrument he’s nowhere near as adept at playing – has forced his voice and lyrics to make up the difference.
However, it’s the return of Cave as the demented carnie-barker-slash-fire’n’brimstone-revivalist-preacher that’s the most wonderful thing about the album, from the declamatory ‘Baby, baby, baby, baby!’ that opens ‘Evil’ (and am I the only one who imagines a spoken intro of ‘I’m gonna tell you about a girl…’) to the growl and purr of the slinky ‘Kitchenette’. And how many other singers can throw ‘billabong’ into a song and make it sound at once sexy and threatening? What this means for the next Bad Seeds disc remains to be seen, but Nick: it’s good to have you back.
Available online now.
