Nick Cave has worn many hats in his storied musical career – metaphorical hats I mean, you’ll rarely see him wearing an actual hat – from post-punk rabble-rouser and goth icon in the 1970s and 80s to fire-and-brimstone preacher and murderous storyteller in the 90s. He spent much of the late 90s and early 2000s anchored at the piano, and the results were often stunning. The tender ballads of The Boatman’s Call especially were timelessly beautiful, but a far cry from the juddering, barely contained chaos of his early years fronting the Birthday Party.
And then, ten years ago, there was Grinderman. A new project, with old friends – essentially half of long term backing band the Bad Seeds – and a very different aesthetic. Fewer band members, more facial hair. Cave playing guitar rather than piano. No crooned love songs, no sombre laments. Dashed off in a mere four days of recording, their eponymous debut album serves up 40 minutes of scuzzy, sleazy garage rock that borrowed from bands like the Stooges and yes, at times, the Birthday Party. Raw and raucous, loud and lewd, it’s the sound of a man and a band letting rip.
The album sets out its stall immediately, with Cave’s spoken intro to “Get It On” declaring “I’ve gotta get up to get down and start all over again / Head on down to the basement and shout”. The basement or the garage – that’s where this music comes from. He then starts babbling about how he needs to “kick those baboons and other motherfuckers out” but just as you start to wonder what the hell he’s on about you’re carried along by a rumbling riff and before you know it you’re yelling along to the chorus. The verses’ lyrics tell the tale of some throwback rockstar who “crawled out of the ooze / He defied evolution” – Cave perhaps winkingly acknowledging the regressive nature of the music he’s now playing – before gleefully asserting that he “drank panther piss and fucked the girls you’re probably married to”.
“No Pussy Blues” gets even more libidinous, with Cave ranting in the first person about how the object of his desire inexplicably resists him as he employs every trick in his slightly pathetic middle-aged playbook. He sucks in his gut, reads her poetry, buys her flowers, and does various domestic chores for her – “but she just laughed and said that she just didn’t want to”. He totally inhabits the vitriolic, emasculated character – the “dammit!” he bellows in the middle of the song is pure frustration, not so much young, dumb and full of come as old, dumb and full of impotent rage – but his tongue is clearly in his cheek behind all the leering.
Writing songs on guitar rather than piano was new to Cave, but his relative amateurishness on that instrument works in the band’s favour. It forces the songs to get to where they’re going more quickly, propelled by often fairly rudimentary guitar lines, allowing space for Warren Ellis to go crazy on violin, viola, bouzouki or mandolin – basically any stringed instrument he can make an unholy racket with.
The record barrels on with more intoxicatingly fast-paced garage stompers like “Depth Charge Ethel”, “Honey Bee (Let’s Fly To Mars)” – which shows off a quintessentially Cave-ish violent streak as the narrator kills a kid who’s “been giving me shit for years” and riding his bike across his lawn – and the closing “Love Bomb”. There are no real missteps here, although it’s generally less effective when the band slow things down. The droning “Electric Alice” and “When My Love Comes Down” are the most skippable tracks on offer.
On the other hand, “Go Tell The Women” and “Man In The Moon” are both glorious. The former comes from the same lyrical space as “No Pussy Blues”, as Cave blusters that “All we wanted was a little consensual rape in the afternoon / And maybe a bit more in the evening”. The latter, muted and piano-led, is the lone outlier here that would fit on a Bad Seeds album. It’s a gorgeous two-minute break from the chaos – but it won’t make you miss the Bad Seeds because you’ll be having too much fun with Grinderman.
Lustful rather than lovelorn, Grinderman showed off Cave as caveman, an unevolved, regressive version of his musical self, letting loose the portion of his psyche that just wants to get down. Primal, laced with jet black humour and, importantly, catchy as hell, this is music that revels in its own ridiculousness. It could have been a mere novelty, a listen-once-and-then-discard sort of record, but it still demands attention a full decade later.
The band’s 2010 follow up was equally listenable – and in “Palaces Of Montezuma” had one utterly transcendent song – but felt a little unnecessary. The intervening Bad Seeds record Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! had largely continued down the garage rock route, and if the Bad Seeds were rocking out again, what was the point of Grinderman any more?
But when this debut album emerged in 2007, it was just a joy to hear Cave and co kicking out the jams again. And to my ears it sounds more like it comes from the gut (or more accurately from the crotch) than any of the 2000s garage revivalist ‘The’ bands and their countless sound-alikes who rode a few recycled riffs to chart success.