Album Review: Grinderman "Grinderman 2"

by: Clint Frost

Say what you will about Nick Cave; you can’t say that he conforms to any popular music trends. Cave (Lead singer of Grinderman,‘80’s-to-now indie stalwart, of Bad Seeds fame), interestingly enough, is probably furthest away from conforming to the general mindset of today’s top “indie/alternative” music-by which I mean, high pitched vocals and lyrics that either induce sympathy from the listener or act as some sort of rallying cry to a legitimized cause (i.e., The Shins, Arcade Fire, respectively)- with Grinderman.

Cave’s deep, preacher-at-the-Church-of-Satan- voice croaks lyrics that create dark stories about characters who far from inspire sympathy. Take for example the crazed siblings in the opening track “Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man;” who are most likely holding a woman against her will and defiling her as the cops arrive at the door. Or the man in “Worm Tamer” who bluntly justifies running around on his wife by saying he “just loved her too long.”

The music on Grinderman 2 is blues indebted rock and roll in its most raw and primitive form, except with tastefully precise modern studio touches. The band gives fresh new life to the archetypal Bo Diddly blues beat employed by “Worm Tamer” just by playing the hell out of it on what sounds like a cheap Wal-Mart guitar and amp, and by placing bits of snake charmer-esque synth noises in just the right places. So the music is just as brutal and relentless as the stories the lyrics tell, with their careless embrace of vilest depths of human desire. However, there are times on the album, though rare, where the smoke clears and the narrators feel a tingling of self-awareness and regret, such as on the heart-breaking “What I Know.” In this ragged acoustic number, Cave steps away from the pulpit, breaks down, and all but sobs about the cruelty of human nature’s inability to be sexually content.

In the end, Grinderman 2 is a great album, though what casual listeners may find hard to digest is the fact that the album’s merits are in the raw beauty in which it exposes the dark, animal impulses that are bottled-up deep in the core of most humans, and what happens when those impulses gain control over all else. 8.1/10

Album Picks: "Worm Tamer," "What I Know," "Palaces of Montezuma"