GRINDERMAN – s/t

(CD/LP, Mute)

Right there from the beginning Nick Cave makes it clear what Grinderman is about: „I have to get up to get down, throw those white mice out, throw those white mice and baboons out.” Starting afresh, from the bottom of a cellar rehearsal room. Or as he said in the latest Wire-article: “...we went into the studio without any fucking idea even what kind of band we wanted to be, or what sort of music we wanted to play and just had to find that out.” Roughly twenty days later in a Paris studio – five days for songwriting, some for structuring and then and then a week for recording – made them come out as a rowdy, runchy and rough collective that bases their songs on a basic blues riff and launches them into outer space of jazz and noiserock from there, mixing dark and cynic humour, recklessly open sexual thoughts and associative narratives with a gripping and distorted sound. Pounding stompers and darkly soothing ballads will be found on the record as well as an astounding array of minute detail. All of this was promised by the stripped down Cave-“solo” performances of the end of last year with the same line-up. The compact and rough production sound makes for a direct re-living of the quasi improvisational style of songwriting and –recording which stands as the overall brackets holding this wild ride of a record together.

Those wild rides and wild facial hairs have become the basic landmark for the marketing of the new band and the four men obviously have a hard time fending of the wrong suspicions and easy associations that the music journalists have, mostly the return to Birthday Party, but they have found an infectious way around that: firstly, presenting the four members of Grinderman as equal members of the band and secondly, behaving like fourty year old randy teenagers in interviewers and puzzling the journalists by re-ruling the interview situation. For instance when Cave philosophizes about how growing the cowboy moustache has improved his marital sex life. The latter strategy boils down to not playing the corporate game by playing it in a different way, but that is (and always has been) a basic rule in Nick Cave’s work and he has gotten around the trap of falling into the anti-pose-pose by gracefully changing his focus ever so often. Still, this latter part of the argument belies the first part, but after all and no matter how much they do about it, Nick Cave will be the frontman of the band.

And as a frontman he has adorned the axe, and though it is sometimes hard to hear where he is playing what exactly, due to the wild sonic loops of Warren Ellis, his guitar playing is something else, because he doesn’t really play the guitar, at least not in the common ways, like lead or rhythm. But like an old blues singer accompanies his singing with single notes and chords banged in various rhythms, which is probably a big challenge for Sclavunos as a drummer. The bass lines of Casey seem easy and straight forward, but try to play along to them and you’ll soon find out that they are more complex than they seem at first. But then there is they sonic frenzy of the guitar solo on the title track which sets completely new marks for music by Nick Cave. Ever since the controlled guitar solo of “Red Right Hand”, is there a real solo you can remember on any of Cave’s songs? Real meaning leaving space for improvisation both in length and tone and solo meaning one instrument playing alone. But as soon as the boss takes up the guitar there will be a solo? No, nothing like that. It is an explosion fitting the song. New territory has always been the traditional home for Cave.