Grinderman – Grinderman 2

Grinderman - Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man

Runs for: 5:42

Opener of the album. Pretty wicked track, but it'll take a few listens to get used to.

Before we get into this, I’ll say that my relationship with Nick Cave and his work has been pretty casual. A lot of people follow him and get hyped up about his stuff, but for me his stuff has always seemed more… I dunno, dad rock I guess?  Ship song was pretty cool and I’ll admit when I hear it I’ll start singing it for about two weeks before I comfortably forget the whole experience, subconsciously ready for the next time it slinks back into my ears – much like the rest of his work.

Now the album mixes musical elements of noise rock with a grungy edge to it, using Nick Cave putting down slow, bluesy vocals to wrap it all together. I mean, while it all sort of works, I’m finding it difficult to find any true standout tracks. Evil is awesome, as is Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man, and I can see tracks Worm Tamer and Heathen Child being both single quality, but there’s something about the album that just really makes me see Nick Cave pushing the thing forward which seems like it’s giving the instrumental side of things a licence to hold back.

But yes - Evil is a fucking tune and a half. There’s a sweet lyrical desperation to it and it breaks out of that desperation into some odd noisy mid riff but the whole thing sounds like some bizarre rock opera – for a lack of better description. A lot of the other tracks have very powerful wordplay, the lyrics are very odd and have a commanding presence and Cave’s delivery is up to par with plenty of carefully placed inflections and staggering in his delivery.

While Cave seems to shine here, unfortunately some of the instrumentals - while cool - just aren’t prominent enough. Bellringer Blues uses some weird effect that could be described as a mandolin recorded then played in reverse. There’s a few tracks where the riffs are bluesy but in those parts the drums and bass are staying a bit too monotonous riff wise. This strikes as a bit weird as they’re trying to get pretty experimental with some of their sounds yet they keep the rest of the song rather simple.

Instrumentally, it’s not catchy. it’s long and drawn out and unfortunately, even in the more subtle sounds, there really doesn’t seem to be anything ground breaking enough to keep the listener wanting to go back. This ends up being a problem because it makes it seem like Nick Cave is the driving force here due to his lyrical strength, and even if that is the case, there are plenty of people who have formed bands around themselves and managed to produce top albums. Josh Homme and his constant cut and swap line-up with Queens of the Stone Age and Dylan Baldi of Cloud Nothings work on Attack on Memory are two good examples of this. Weirdly enough, the album seemed to do well both by metacritic standards and against other albums from 2010. Not saying that it's terrible but there are definite flaws here that people seem to be overlooking because of how good Cave is.

Reccomended for: Nick Cave fans obviously, those who want bluesy, sinister-but-cool noise rock.

Grinderman - Evil

Runs for: 2:55

I'm really digging the comparitive lyrics. 'Who needs TV, you are my TV'.  

Lyrically there' a lot of very strong stuff going on here and the music is cleverly sinister to boot.