Grinderman 2

The new Grinderman record sounds like the work of an artist stuck in no-man’s land, writes REN? SCHAEFER.

For a few years now, Nick Cave has been trying to shake off the myth of genius that has persistently clung to him like shit to a bear’s fur. With Grinderman 2 he comes pretty damn close. It’s not a bad album per se, but it has the dubious distinction of being his most boring creation to date.

The eponymous first Grinderman album at least provided some cheap thrills for those who still wanted Cave to be the fat little insect buzzing around the head of square society, the Black Crow King stalking the gothic badlands of bible-belt America, the decadent Prince Of Darkness reclining in a red naugahyde booth in a Brazilian nightclub, or the patriarch of violent comic book misogyny.

At least there were some half-decent riffs, albeit ones pilfered wholesale from the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s waning days. Somehow, Cave and his rag-tag band of beardy collaborators (the last survivors of the sinking ship that was The Bad Seeds) still managed to instill some excitement into the slight creations that were ?No Pussy Blues? and ?Honey Bee (Let’s Fly To Mars)?. Underneath the hoopla and the faux No Wave noise though, it was plain even then that Cave was running out of creative steam.

Like a man who knew his best days were behind him, Cave kept throwing himself into all sorts of crazy projects – Hollywood film scripts that would never be optioned, a book that read like a Vice Magazine special issue full of gross-out celebrity gossip and juvenile dirty jokes. The question remained: To what end? Cynics suggested a mid-life crisis, but this somehow seems too pat, too cliched. Rather, it appears that Nick Cave has realised that his muse has dried up, but his own vanity won’t let him stop working.

?It appears that Nick Cave has realised that his muse has dried up, but his own vanity won’t let him stop working.?

Cave’s work ethic is legendary, and his output is monumental. His art was always at his best when he had something to obsess about. In the early days of The Boys Next Door, and then The Birthday Party, there were his glam and punk heroes that spurred him on. Iggy, Ziggy, Roxy Music, all played their part. Then he immersed himself in literature: the childlike absurdism of Alfred Jarry, the apocalyptic middle-american horror of Flannery O’Connor, and finally the source of all insanity: The Old Testament. Cave’s obsessions bore strange and beautiful fruit when filtered through the fevered suburban punk imagination of an ex-Grammar School student turned drug fiend nihilist.

Cave was never really that talented himself, but he had clever mates. Mick Harvey and Rowland S Howard created the canvas on which the singer could unleash his maniacal action painting and splatter sensibilities. When it all fell apart, our hero drafted in a new foil to his ego, in the form of teutonic ?bermensch and fellow wastoid Blixa Bargeld, a man who knew how to milk every last ounce of pathos from chaos. Mix Berlin violence with Delta Blues and voila: The Bad Seeds!

Mick Harvey reined all this wayward energy in like some kind of saintly headmaster, making sure albums like From Her To Eternity* (1984) and *The Firstborn Is Dead (1985) straddled the knife edge between intoxicated genius and collapse. Cave was creating his own myth and many people bought into it. Some of them were famous, like filmmaker Wim Wenders, some of them were hacks writing for British music rags. All of them conspired to feed Cave’s ego.

With increasing cult status, there was a sense that the boy from Warracknabeal was infallible, but bit by bit complacency crept in. The first indication of this arrived in the form of Henry’s Dream* (1992), an album that should have been a triumph, but suffered from flat production and some less-than-inspired songwriting. Whereas Bad Seeds albums previously had been works worth considering as a whole, spanning compelling narrative and sonic arcs, from the mid ?90s to the last decent Bad Seeds record, *Lyre Of Orpheus/Abattoir Blues (2004), a downward gradient of diminishing returns was evident.

Each album had its high points, marked by exceptional songwriting and arrangements, but as the fingers at the controls kept turning down Bargeld’s razor wire guitar in the mix, so the excitement and danger vanished from the compositions. Instead, noise was replaced with lounge lizard sophistication. Pundits kept mentioning Cave in the same breath as giants like Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed (themselves no strangers to the wandering attention of their muse). If it’s written in glossy magazines it must be true.

By 2004 Bargeld was gone. The Bad Seeds were a well-oiled touring machine, as slippery as an eel. The last great guitarist that graced the line-up, James Johnston of the phenomenal British band Gallon Drunk, was eventually made redundant by the usurping pyrotechnics of violinist Warren Ellis. The sound of the band was irrevocably altered. Cave seized on this injection of vitality into the band and gradually he and Ellis became as the architects of the band’s sound.

Harvey saw the writing on the wall and got out while the going was still reasonably good and he could maintain some sort of dignity. Playing drums with his old friend Rowland S Howard again probably helped him to make up his mind. Cave was immersed in extracurricular activities anyway, composing and recording a staggering seven film soundtracks and theatrical scores in the space of four years, aided by his new best friend Ellis. The release of the mediocre Bad Seeds album Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!(2008), and a tour that increasingly resembled a glitzy ?Elvis in Vegas? revue, reportedly proved to be the last straw for Harvey.

Somewhere in there, Cave, Ellis, American drummer Jim Sclavunos and bassist Martin Casey had found the time to start a little side project under the name Grinderman. The first Grinderman album didn’t quite set the world on fire. It was touted as a homage to the don’t-give-a-fuck attitude of the New York No Wave movement of the late ?70s/early ?80s, of which Sclavunos had been a celebrated proponent. Unfortunately, his memory might have dimmed a bit since his youth, because instead of confrontational brutality, the album was filled with half-arsed blues riffs, sloppy funk progressions and clumsily tacked on noise parts. Worst of all, Cave seemed to have discovered his inner-child and embraced a deliberately puerile writing style, not enhanced by his nasal, petulant delivery.

?The problem with Grinderman is not so much that Cave has set out to demystify his legacy, but that he seems to have lost his inspiration and direction in the process.?

Still, the band’s debut now appears like a creative peak in comparison to Grinderman 2. On this album Cave and Ellis produce a plethora of gimmicky guitar and electric bouzouki noises, all drenched in inappropriate wah-wah effects, which soon get tiresome. All this pissfarting around, and even the drafting in of prog-rock granddaddy Robert Fripp to contribute some extra noodling, can’t disguise the lack of actual substance at the core of the songs. While Sclavunos and Casey are a formidable rhythm section, there is barely a memorable tune in evidence. Some of the more forceful moments, such as ?Mickey Mouse And The Goodbye Man? and ?Evil? might recall distant echoes of The Birthday Party, but they are all too feeble and clean sounding, flattened by the anemic treatment of veteran producer Nick Launay.

Even the crude sounding guitar workouts could be forgiven if a haunting melody, a startling lyric, or the hint of a violent need for expression lurked underneath. Instead, every line Cave delivers sounds tentative, semi-improvised and completely uninspired. What marked his songs as special in the past was the ability to turn the mundane imagery of domestic cabin fever and inner-turmoil into arresting poetry. Unfortunately, there’s none of that to be found here. Instead, the listener can already anticipate every single line of a throwaway song like ?Evil?, which is anything but that.

The nadir of the album arrives in the form of ?What I Know?, a song heavily indebted to Smog’s ?Teenage Spaceship?, without any of Bill Callahan’s knack for a terse narrative that culminates in a killer d’nouement. The execrable ?Palaces Of Montezuma? strings together meaningless images drawn from pop culture and is backed by a musical arrangement that seems like a pale ghost of The Bad Seeds? intricate tapestries of sound. There’s nothing here with the violent intensity that would put it on a par with songs such as ?The Mercy Seat? or ?Stagger Lee?. Even the half-decent final track ?Bellringer Blues? does little to redeem the album as a whole.

The problem with Grinderman is not so much that Cave has set out to demystify his legacy, but that he seems to have lost his inspiration and direction in the process, and now can’t decide which road to travel down. Either he can choose to claim his place on Mount Olympus alongside dignified deities like Scott Walker and Tom Waits, or he must destroy his own myth a lot more effectively, pissing on everything he previously valued in some ultimate iconoclastic gesture. For the moment, he seems to be stuck somewhere in no-man’s land, and that’s not a good place for an artist to be.

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Grinderman 2 is out now through Mute Records.