Grinderman
Grinderman
Mute



Grinderman is music that goes back to base: the basest of yearnings, animal need and male desire. I am unsure if many bands could get away with No Pussy Blues, an endearingly desperate single held down by an insistent bass line and a lyric-free chorus of white noise release, but Nick Cave and company can. It is a tale of what one man would do for it, from the romantic "a dozen white doves" to the mundane "did her dishes in rubber gloves". One would think by the end she might just relent, as he incessantly buzzes around her like a blow fly.

Grinderman is a handful of Bad Seeds, featuring Cave and long time associates Warren Ellis (electric bouzouki, other stringed things), Martyn Casey (bass) and Jim Sclavunos (percussion). The quartet came together to create songs for the double album 'Abattoir Blues'/'Lyre Of Orpheus', and it spawned a more collaborative way of working, and supplanted Cave's presentation of songs to the group. In 2006 the four hirsute men pushed the new song writing process a little further than a Bad Seeds album and this self titled, onomatopoeic debut was born. The album offers a slew of indulgent, sleazy, garage tracks such as Get It On, the great ensemble rock crusade Honey Bee (Let's Fly to Mars), the marvellous Depth Charge Ethel, finishing with the stomping Love Bomb. 'Grinderman' also contains a couple of ballads that seem a little out of place (though totally Cave) such as Man In The Moon. There is the occasional, welcome oddity, like the title track, a spacious, no wave sideshow. By the time Go Tell The Women comes along the fellows are withdrawing favours from the ladies, relations are so grim, and this old time morality lends a certain charm to the album, but the band is the star. Cave could have stepped out of the frame and let them simmer on the cesspool of noise rock When My Love Comes Down, but Grinderman is complete with it's faults. It is four artists trying to push out of the norm, casting their seed a little further a field.

Narelle Walker