Grinderman is the sound of indie rock legends growing old disgracefully, and that is by no means a criticism. From the opening rant of "Get It On," this is an album with all the menace of an angry drunk, dripping with anger and testosterone (as the surfeit of facial hair in the band's interior photo will attest). It could even be the sound of Nick Cave's midlife crisis, but it doesn't matter, because Grinderman rocks. It's the sound of four musicians having a grand time, turning the volume up to 11 and really cutting loose. For that reason, it's the more upbeat tracks here that are probably the best: "Honey Bee (Let's Fly to Mars)" with its driving electric organ, the primal urgency of "Depth Charge Ethel," and the strutting album closer "Love Bomb." After all the po-faced seriousness he's displayed in recent years, it's good to know that Cave has rediscovered his sense of humour: "I cleaned the sheets on my bed, I combed the hairs across my head, I sucked in my gut and still she said, 'I don't want to,'" he sings on "No Pussy Blues," with his tongue firmly in cheek (amongst other places). Simply put, Grinderman is a hoot. --Ted Kord
Review by Thom Jurek
After the epic proportions of Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus double-disc in which Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds laid out two sides of the songwriter's melodic and ambitious look at both rock & roll and balladry, Grinderman sounds like a wild, nasty, wooly rock & roll monolith who simply need to let it rip and then see what happens. Along with Warren Ellis, Martyn P. Casey and Jim Sclavunos (right, 3/7 of the Bad Seeds),Cave and company turn in a squalling, raucous, twist-and-turn garage band set that takes on all comers. Check out the opening line of the single "No Pussy Blues" for clues as to why the songwriting screenwriter (and seriously B-grade actor) may be doing this -- the sounds of a typewriter plunking only to be joined by a Sclavunos' hi hat before Cave prattles in spoken word with real menace: "My face is finished, my body's gone, and I can't help thinking but think standing up here with all this applause and gazing down at all the young and beautiful with looking up with their questioning eyes/That I must above all things love myself..." Joined by a snarling bass, he goes on to try to woo some young woman in the crowd with all his tricks, from sucking in his gut and getting all togged up to quoting her Yeats to doing her dishes and sending her doves, but he is rejected. The wail of age is fraught with both danger and delight as he continues his desperate and unsuccessful attempt at seduction, but all he ends up with is the "no pussy blues." It adds up to two things: black humor and a love for the kind of rock & roll younger musicians have to plot, plan, pose and dig deep into their record collections to try and emulate. When the band jumps in with all the racket unleashed, the track is as tragically funny as it is unhinged. The singer's frustration is understood and empathized with to the point of sheer vitriol. And it's a careening jolt of rock & roll that would send his listeners to the volume control for more. The opening track "Get It On" is similar but even wilder: it comes bursting out of the box like a rabid wolf. Even on the slower tunes such as "Electric Alice," a story-song, the grimy organ sounds and Ellis' distorted bouzouki and violin meet the slippery mud shuffle of Sclavunos' drums and Casey's plodding, droning bassline. All of this said, there are moments here, such as on "Depth Charge Ethel" and "Honey Bee (Let's Fly to Mars") where Grinderman are so freaking awesome they transcend the garage band thing altogether and sound like some flipped-out cross between Suicide, the Stooges, Bo Diddley and the Scientists. The songs come through and stand on their own amid the noise, so don't be surprised if some of these evil little nuggets get new treatments when the Bad Seeds reconvene. While the sound of pure snarl and glee is what melts the speaker cabinets the most, the overdriven menace of most these songs doesn't undermine their worth as songs. Cave is far too gifted for that and his bandmates are too empathetic to let him veer too far off course. The album closes with "Love Bomb," with Cave railing on electric guitar. It's a pumping anthem of pure male libidinal dis-ease that takes the sentiments of "No Pussy Blues" to the extreme, though Bob Dylan could have written the words. It's an anthem of male malaise, dysfunction, the rage at emasculation and desire. In fact, the protagonist in most of these songs is literally sick with it, and so is almost all of the music itself here. Grinderman, not the Bad Seeds, are the most logical -- though not necessarily similar-sounding or serious -- extension of the Birthday Party legacy Cave left behind 25 years ago. These are songs to chew on, get knocked down by, guffaw at, and take deep inside your own shadow side to celebrate. Grinderman is the impure rock & roll album to beat in 2007.
Grinderman
Grinderman
[Anti-; 2007]
Rating: 7.7
For decades, Nick Cave, ringmaster of his own rock'n'roll circus, has been an unlikely paragon of routine. Not routine music, per se, but music made as part of a routine. Check in to the office, check out of the office. Repeat. Don't wait for your muse to come to you. Go to her first and demand she appear. Contrary to his reputation as a bit of a wild man, by his own account Cave's spent the past several years a man of discipline, with rules right down to what rules need be discarded, and when.
Grinderman, then, is Cave's considered decision to set aside those rules and make a sideways move into the realm of stripped down-- but far from mellow-- rock. Inspired by the creation of the most recent Bad Seeds release, Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, Cave took his cohorts Warren Ellis, Martyn Casey, and Jim Sclavunos into the studio to slash and burn their way through new ideas until they'd amassed enough for an album. Unlike Abattoir/Lyre however, Cave kept the remaining Bad Seeds on the sidelines and, rather than flesh out the results, left them raw and stinging, setting aside his piano in favor of guitar.
By doing so Cave has predictably invited comparisons to his first claim to fame, the Birthday Party-- and not without reason. Grinderman reveals Cave has rediscovered (or at least reembraced) the possibilities of the theatrical punk dirge, with arrangements that threaten to fly right off the rails.
But the Cave of the Birthday Party and the Cave of Grinderman are totally different beasts, and for that we can thank Cave's (yes) discipline-- as a writer, singer and as a bandleader. Grinderman are an indulgent study in excess, sure, but the twist is that at every turn Cave keeps the chaos carefully in check, emphasizing messiness when need be but also showcasing the deceptively precise playing of his band as well as his loose and at times gloriously silly lyrics.
The savage and snarling Birthday Party were as stark and nihilistic as the Bad Seeds are bombastic and apocalyptic, but Cave has never fully played the role of Prince of Darkness. As a songwriter he can be scary, moving, and intense, but thankfully Cave's rarely humorless. In fact, Cave's mirthfulness is one of his enduring gifts. He's the kind of guy who'll rhyme "Orpheus" with "orifice" not just because it's clever, but also because his inner Beavis & Butthead finds it funny.
Grinderman may be intended as a somewhat goofy reassertion of punk vigor and virility, but the disc is no laughing matter. "Get It On" starts the album in tease-mode, all build-up and no pay-off that nonetheless introduces the arsenal at hand: fuzzed out guitar, insistent rhythms, warts and all takes, oozing with animalistic sex and sleaze.
The many pleasures of "No Pussy Blues" have been praised for months, and rightly so: The song's hilarious, with Cave's pleas for sex grower stronger and stronger until he practically creams himself with indignation when his increasingly desperate romantic overtures go roundly rebuffed. It flirts with camp, especially with its typewriter intro, but who can complain when Cave and crew are clearly having so much fun?
Songs like this show why Grinderman probably wouldn't have worked as a full-fledged Bad Seeds project. It's just too concertedly unhinged, and despite the modest ranks of the reduced band there's hardly any room for anything else. The title track is a thick slab of Gothic VU blues, as perverse and insidious as any of Cave's other character pieces, its tortured guitar coda like twisting metal. "Go Tell the Women" proudly takes the piss as it revels in its own primitive stupidity-- it's self-parody and salacious blues tribute all in one. "Honey Bee (Let's Fly to Mars)" is Cave and crew's stab at a woozy, wobbly garage stomper, like many of the other Grinderman songs both a call to arms and a come-on. "Won't somebody touch me?" Cave demands as the world falls apart around him.
The exceptions serve as little breathers, breaks from the onslaught. "Electric Alice" is unlucky enough to follow "No Pussy Blues", so it would probably sound like a throw-away experiment in psychedelic loops and textures even it weren't a throw-away experiment in psychedelic loops and textures. The measured soul of "(I Don't Need You to) Set Me Free" and the familiar melodrama of "Man in the Moon" and "When My Love Comes Down" are prime Cave, but each marks a slight deviation from the Grinderman aesthetic. They're just a little too classy, too neat, despite the roaring undercurrent of musical violence in the last, which picks up right before the song cuts off.
That leaves the somewhat anticlimactic "Love Bomb", nonetheless a much better approximation of the death of the 60s fin de siecle vibe than anything on the embarrassing Stooges reunion disc. Yes, the lyrics split the difference between 21st century Doors portent and Iggy's own current pop-culture citing missteps. The difference is that Cave's winking delivery implies he recognizes that dumb is just a state of mind, and he's more than willing to subsume his smarts for the sake of the music. By taking one for the team and donning a Stooge-worthy dunce cap, Cave in turn gives us so much more, and frees up is Id to wreak glorious havoc.
-Joshua Klein, April 06, 2007
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