Grinderman are exactly what you want from a rock band; loud, offensive with a healthy dosage of facial hair. The side project from the winning partnership of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis is a completely different beast altogether from their day job, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. It was infact the Bad Seed's most recent offering, 'Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!' that suspended the production of the follow-up to Grinderman's debut, released in 2007. Perhaps, we have 'Grinderman' to thank for the brilliance of 'Dig', one of the stand-out albums of their 14 record discography, for sometimes a change in name can release and take on a new persona.
In Grinderman, Cave maintains the raw power, intense lyrics and blues laced with guitar feedback and adds a new ingredient of humour to the bag. While their first album explored the frustrations of man's lust, most notably in the appropriately named song, 'No Pussy Blues' this inability to get laid seems to have been resolved in the follow up. In stand-out track 'Worm-tamer' Cave announces, "My baby calls me the Loch Ness monster/Two great big humps and then I’m gone”, quite the admission from a 52 year old man. The album benefits from the fact that he doesn't take himself too seriously, an accusation he has had to deal with previously. Whereas Cave albums have taken his audience to darker places exploring topics of life, death and religion that necessitated engagement, Grinderman 2 (despite its sexual deprivation) can be appreciated from an emotive and basic level. Songs such as 'Palaces of Montezuma' and 'Bellringer Blues' ooze attitude and swagger and it is easy to imagine the man prowling the stage much like the very wolf that fronts the album cover. This is made possible in short by the experimentive sounds of scraping, echoes and distortion found in even the softer of songs such as, 'What I Know' undoubtedly made possible by Ellis and his infamous electric bouzouki.
Grinderman appears to be a release of some sort of tension for both artists, an unstoppable force of menace and noise from a group of musicians who continue to push boundaries. I sincerely hope that Grinderman and the Bad Seeds can continue to work in tandem.
