Grinderman
Grinderman 2
“I was Mickey Mouse... He was the big bad woooooooooooooooooooooolf”.
The cover of the first Griderman album is a confused-looking monkey with its hands on its junk as someone sprays it with an off-camera hose. The cover of Grinderman 2 is a wolf, soaking wet and snarling. It’s standing on the marble floor of a gaudy bathroom filled with ugly over-designed mirrors and Renaissance statues. Both of these covers accurately give the impressions of their respective albums - Grinderman is a nasty, anxious, horny record that has Nick Cave screaming “Won’t somebody touch me!” and thinking about beating the kid across the street to death for looking at him funny. It’s sexual frustration made sound, and still it has enough of a head on its shoulders to know that guys Cave and Ellis’ age should not still be having these problems, or at least not talking about them on an album. Grinderman 2’s cover fits the album so perfectly - here’s the real truth about these guys in one image. They think of themselves as wild animals ready to snap in a gilded cage, but more likely they’re entertaining fantasies of being scumbags in between picking out paint swatches for the bedroom. This is the same frustration that was there on the first album, but now it feels more resigned to its place, and so the fantasies are weirder and less teenage. This is the juvenilia of a grown man.
In the past few years, and maybe it’s Warren Ellis’ growing influence, but since the first Grinderman album it feels like Cave is making music where the words are not taking such massive precedence over the music. The two Grinderman albums, the soundtracks, and even Dig, Lazarus, Dig are all less focused on Cave as a lyricist (which, better or worse the Bad Seeds are a backing band for a singer/songwriter). The new stuff - especially Grinderman 2 - is clearly music first, so automatically the lyrics are less writerly. The thing is, they are so much better. Cave is a hell of a writer, with his own weirdness and tics even at his most mannered, most overwritten. It's there when you listen to a song like “Worm Tamer”, which is basically the apocalyptic psych version of a pussy rap, Cave intoning “my baby calls me the loch ness monster, two great big humps and then I’m gone, actually i’m the abominable snowman, and I guess I’ve loved you for too long”. The best moment of Cave singing on the record isn’t even anything particularly clever, it's just him screaming “Oh Baby Baby Baby Baby” on “Evil”. And the rap connection - for me the mindset I get into when listening to the best gangsta rap - where it’s not so much a wish fulfillment thing, although that's a part of it, but a place where that kind of macho bullshit and antipathy towards women - for that to be worked out. (Then again, that’s a cop-out because the real great stuff, Ice Cube’s “Black Korea” for example, is aware of just how vile these thoughts are even as it glamorizes them.) People who have descried the Grinderman stuff as misogynistic definitely miss the whole element: yes, it is and yes, that’s intentional. It doesn’t back away from confronting it, either.
“Kitchenette” is like Van Morrison’s “T.B. Sheets” if it were made by a sex-addicted 40 year old dad who could give a fuck about any metaphor that wasn’t referencing a vagina. Or maybe Pulp’s “Disco 2000” (which hey, Cave covered this one time) if Jarvis wasn’t whimsical or nostalgic, just really interested in fucking a married woman. Cave rasps out “What's this husband of yours ever given you? Oprah Winfrey on a plasma screen? And a brood of junkie bucktoothed imbeciles... the ugliest fuckin kids I’ve ever seen”. It’s skeevy and awkward, but it’s honest and a little badass. Cave is not a young man anymore, and his concerns have long moved on from the normal awful rock and roll pickup lines.
The album, even in the quiet tracks, is dominated by Amon Duul II-style guitar squall and thick drums, Cave’s voice sometimes feels like he’s pressing against it. Considering his voice, that’s pretty significant, as Cave dominated even the first Grinderman album. The band sounds a lot more comfortable with languid psych noise than they did with the ATTACK ATTACK ATTACK sound they showed up with. The sound is what's coaxing Cave to uncoil his psychoses. “Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man” is pretty definitive a snapshot of this - when shaving comes into the Cain And Abel Kidnapping Persona Rocky Erickson Vampire narrative, it stops being a story and just becomes a pouring out of Cave’s subconscious. It's the first song on the album, you get to decide if you’re up for this early. You want into this guys head? Because if you don’t there’s a whole bunch of bands that have that guitar sound, some of them are pretty good. But you’re going to have a hard time finding anything like this.
-Sean Witzke, 2010
You know, I think... as much as I'm able to react to anything objectively, I reckon that this is better than the first Grinderman album, but I just can't get into it.
Maybe I'm just not in the right place this year, I dunno. Good write-up though!
Posted by: Illogical Volume | 2010.12.17 at 07:31