Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!
Given just how much I have loved the last two Nick Cave releases – Grinderman and the Lyre of Orpheus/Abattoir Blues double album – I was actually a little nervous to hear this. What if my hero let me down! Stupid, I know, but I so wanted to love this album I actually didn’t know if I’d be able to listen to it anything like objectively.
Well listen to it I have, and again and again and again, and I feel just about ready to toss my tuppence into the great ocean of words that the internet spews forth every day. In general, it’s a pretty healthy thumbs up for Dig Lazarus Dig, but not without a caveat here and there. In terms of where it sits within the Cave canon, I’d place the sound of this album about half way between Grinderman and Cave’s partially successful 2001 album No More Shall We Part. The Grinderman influence is clearly present and the lush orchestration of Orpheus/Abattoir is pretty much gone. Cave may draw a line between the working methods of his Grinderman stuff and his Bad Seeds stuff, but from a listener’s point of view this comes across as a pretty clear continuation of the Grinderman digression.
I love Grinderman of course, so this is squarely a Good Thing, in my book. The strut, the sauce and the dark funk that permeates what these fellows have been up to for the last few years sits very well with me indeed, but in the case of this album the raging, defiant growl of Grinderman has been replaced by a more rolling funk which robs Lazarus of some of the incendiary power of that record.
Consequently songs like Moonland just don’t really hit the spot with me, and it’s actually when he goes back to the raging of Grinderman that I am happier, such as the confrontational We Call Upon the Author to Explain. Night of the Lotus Eaters is fantastic as well, all brooding menace and demonic undertones. And thus it goes on. As you can I tell, seem to be finding it impossible not to compare this to Grinderman, which Cave would probably really not appreciate, but the sound is similar enough that there’s a degree of inevitability about that.
It may not be brilliant from start to finish, but there are plenty of superb songs on this and as a fairly committed fan I am all too happy to follow Nick along these explorations of new territory. Casual fans may find this more frustrating, I’d imagine, but I am really enjoying it.
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – We Call Upon the Author to Explain
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – Midnight Man
Weirdly, very weirdly, my summation of this is EXACTLY like yours – listen to this Wednesday’s show (9pm – 11pm GMT AND NOT 10PM – MIDNIGHT like it was supposed to be & was listed as such & I advertised as such) & you’ll see how spooky a coincidence this one is.
Good innit, though?
re: this Wednesday’s TWR, the dull fucking twats at the station failed to advise me (despite me warning them weeks in advance that I’d be away & pre-recording/advertising 3 shows well in advance of broadcast date & supplying them with the first two last week) that they will be bending towards the favour of the USA time zone (i.e. the daylight saving fucking hour) rather than the EU/UK time zone. Therefore, as mentioned above, this week the show goes out an hour early. Except, they only told me this a few hours ago AFTER all the fliers had been produced & sent & emails sent & blogs contacted & myspace spammed etc & so on. Fucking cocks. Now The Woman Of The House has to re-contact everyone & let them know of the change.
Nice use of the word ‘jejune’…very pleasing. I have, I admit, only made the time to listen to the album through once on MySpace so far, but I do have a bit of a penchant for Nick Cave…
…canny set of lyrics about Bukowsi/Hemingway/etc. too…might have to get a bit more stuck in to ‘Lazarus’ methinks!
P.s. Felt the need to come back and share a great line that stuck with me from reading Tom Robbins’ ‘Still Life With Woodpecker’. Which was:
“I leased the Charles Bukowski Suite in the Been-Down-So-Long-It-Looks-Like-Up-To-Me Hotel”
And which, strangely, I quoted in a blog yonks and yonks ago, but I linked to that post from my most recent one only yesterday!
utterly on the money is this for me.
some fluke meant the record was in the shops in singapore so i got to hear it without much of a wait and because Nick might be worth a chucklesome quote i did actually read some interviews and the like and oh how they fall at his feet… which should have made me suss. is it like recent Bob Dylan – where by the time the press catches up they’re really just dazzled that this bloke has outlived all the crap they tried to fob upon us … and so it’s time to bury them w/ praise. (this based on scantest impressions)
Some fluke? You mean it wasn’t considered ‘inappropriate’ by the culture police?
Well there’s a little of that with Nick Cave, I think. I mean, I do get the impression that he’s a pretentious muppet, and a old, successful pretentious muppet seems to inspire more awe than a young, aspiring pretentious muppet.
He is genuinely brilliant though. And for someone of his age to be so continually and successfully reinventing himself is highly unusual. Even Tom Waits’ last album wasn’t very good.