Grinderman Comes Of Age!?!?...?

I have just listened to Nick Cave in his new incarnation as 'Grinderman' with Warren Ellis, Martyn P Casey and Jim Sclavunos. Their opening shot is the single 'Heathen Child' from the album 'Grinderman 2' which is due for release 6th September, 2010.

Listen Here:
http://soundcloud.com/muterecords/heathen-child

I hate to criticise the boys because they hold such a special place in my heart and mind but if I am brutally honest, the first Grinderman album didn't do much for me other than leave me feeling aggressive and my other emotions cold and shut down. Gone was the lyrical magnificence and sonic golddust that smashed you in the soul with subtlety and savagery in equal measure. It sounded to me like a bunch of guys railing against the big five oh and trying to regain the sexual potence of youth via a ramping up of their dark and dirty side. This to the detriment of their other subtleties that have continuously made me fall in love with them over and over again over the decades. If there was a law against sonic obscenity, Grinderman would have broken it but on a more charitable note, perhaps my discomfort is a gender-oriented one. During production, Warren likes to fly more by the seat of his pants which perhaps hastened the bowing out of Mick Harvey, the grand organiser. The production on Grinderman was so fast and loose that it lost any edge it might have gained with me because of a lack of cohesion and tightness. A new and unique vision was there in its infancy but it was a mite too squalling and depraved even for my dark-side tastes (and PS I loved 'And The Ass Saw The Angel'). Gone was the tenderness and heart that drew me in to the Bad Seeds black visions. Though Grinderman remains in my collection as a curio of my all-time favourite group of musicians, it is not, like the rest of the Bad Seeds, something that sits on my 'most played' iPod list. And with profound relief (because I feel disloyal whenever I say anything negative about 'The Dark Lord' / Arachnoman etc), I now move on to the much more palatable positives.

Holy shit, 'Heathen Girl' is transcendent. It's tight, controlled and cohesive and Oh My God, does it pack a punch at the end! Pseudo-religious blues filth dancing just on the right side of depravity that will take you to the edge, hang you off it and just when you think the end is nigh, will pull you back, dust you down and with an undignified shove, send you on your way beaten and bloody with a maniacal grin on your face shrieking "Damn, I gotta get me more of that!" I have listened to the preview more than twenty times already and Bravo boys, Bravo!!!!! All is forgiven in Grinderman world! Even if the rest of the album fails to live up to the promise of this magnificent preview, it will still boast a powerhouse of a a song - a top-class, Cave at-his-best original that deserves to become part of his mythology.
I haven't been able to find the lyrics posted anywhere yet so I tried to transcribe them myself but everytime I try to decipher them in to a set, I am hypnotised in to an alternate state of reality by the malevolent chanting and riffing. Therefore, what follows is a piece of imagery prose provoked and inspired by listening to the song and free-writing.


Juke joints and honky tonks, aquamarine deltas and screaming, steaming, half-decayed swamps full of jewels of golden sunlight through water drops and obsidian shadows. Fireflies, crocodiles and Spanish moss hangin' from the extra-terrestrial cypress trees. Preachers on pulpits screaming at the ears of the heavens - saving the faithful sinners and condemning the unrepentant no-shows to eternal damnation in the depths of Hell. Daily doses of miracle curings and exorcisms for congregations in the concealed, whitewashed, churches whilst around them the deepest, darkest secrets are strangled and submerged in the slowly rotating, inky waters that flow threateningly around the sun-drenched islets.



An impenetrable and final resting place for countless worm-picked skulls and bones. They clack their teeth malevolently in fleshless mouths and fulcrum jaws wobble and whisper in reedy, wavering voices of the evil deeds that sent them to these violent, uninvited and unwelcomed ends. They cast voodoo curses and invoke demons upon those who have wronged them. Low-grade alcohol, strange crystalline substances and heat inflame the blood, fuelling a dreamlike consciousness evolved from red moonshine and sun so hot you wanna die. The days and nights coalesce together in to a melting, smelting, sweltering, boiling, roiling mess. Water vapour hangs in the air like crude oil - a cloying and suffocating blanket that smothers and saps those caught in its inescapable, vice-like tendril shroud.


Even night brings no cool relief as the prayed for breeze is imprisoned by the spectral remains of the heat of the day. The sky screams in desperation for a summer storm of crashing, arcing depravity. Lightning flashes on the horizon and thunder rumbles, taunting in a barely perceptible subsonic register. Sanity depends upon the storm's arrival and until the sky's blessed release of heat and water and electricity, you will exist in a static state of feverish, crackling madness that makes you want to fuck the whole world and everything in it.

Thank you Nick, the Wolfman has arrived. Can't wait for a tour and the rest of the album - roll on September 13th!!!!

Sassyschoolmarm