Album review: Grinderman, ‘Grinderman 2’

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Be it as a songwriter, screenwriter (‘The Proposition’) or novelist (‘The Death of Bunny Munro,’ ‘And the Ass Saw the Angel’), Australian singer Nick Cave is a man of words, and he excels at constructing unforgettable scenes filled with emotions at the edge, whether anger, obsession, vindication, degradation, regret or some combination thereof.

Case in point: The purest love song on ‘Grinderman 2,’ the second album from Cave’s newest band, is called ‘Evil,’ and it’s set in a rented hotel room where the narrator’s clinging to a lover. ‘Who needs the stars?’ he wonders affectionately. ‘You are the stars.’ It’s a beautiful sentiment, except that as he’s listing all the things she’s replaced -- the moon, TV, children -- voices behind him are screaming, ‘Evil rising!,’ while at the other end of a phone line a man is breathing heavily. Ah, love.

In the three decades-plus that Cave has been making music -- whether as the frenzied singer of both Boys Next Door and the Birthday Party, or with his long-running backing band the Bad Seeds -- he has been a blues singer in the John Lee Hooker vein, a weirdo pop crooner recalling Lee Hazlewood and a flat-out rocker a la Iggy Pop. On ‘Grinderman 2,’ he combines them all to create a maniacal egotist who proudly boasts on ‘Worm Tamer’ that ‘my baby calls me the Loch Ness monster / Two great big humps and then I’m gone.’

Throughout the album, Cave’s band lets loose with a din of electric guitars and heavy bass. If at times he leans on conceits that he’s overused in the past -- he dots his narratives with creeps such as the executioner with a glass eye on ‘Kitchenette,’ and too often sets his songs in the Wild West -- his skill at crafting work drenched with the blood and tears of human flaws remains unparalleled, and makes ‘Grinderman 2’ an essential rock and roll document.

-- Randall Roberts

Grinderman

‘Grinderman 2’

(Anti-)

Three and a half stars