Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 03/03/08
Label: Mute

It might seem like a singularly inappropriate metaphor to apply to a band who maintain their pallid, post-midnight complexions with an almost professional dedication, but the 14th studio effort by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds is in effect their holiday-tan album. Cave's most recent venture was his helming of Grinderman - a rougher, readier, more physically robust and plain randier project, which stood in marked contrast to the measured narratives and controlled structure of the Bad Seeds' oeuvre.

Their "Grinderman" debut showed Cave, Warren Ellis, Martyn Casey and Jim Sclavunos not only as spiritual siblings of The Stooges, Suicide, Pixies and the like, but also of Alice Coltrane and a host of free jazzers. It also saw them truly fired-up by rock's visceral and immediate thrills, kicking back and letting rip like kids half their age. This reinvigorating experience informs the Bad Seeds' latest, Cave and co's time "away" imparting their parent band with a particular creative glow that may last quite some time.

The "Abattoir Blues / The Lyre Of Orpheus" double opus from 2004 would have left many a lesser band washed-up on the shores of creative exhaustion and gasping for inspiration, but these extraordinarily hep, 45-plus cats have seemingly limitless artistic reserves and "Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!" is nothing less than a thrillingly rambunctious knees-up, full of sly humour and swashbuckling, kick-ass cool. Filthy, squalling keyboards, almost indecently raw, FX-treated guitar and uncharacteristically loose vocals are all inherited from "Grinderman".

Meanwhile echoes of the early days of The Jesus & Mary Chain, Hüsker Dü and Dinosaur Jr (most notably, on "Albert Goes West" and "Lie Down Here (And Be My Girl)") and the aforementioned Stooges and Pixies abound, but this album is no mere reprise. The brooding and ominously clanging "Night Of The Lotus Eaters" casts a very different shadow, as does the spaghetti-western-toned "Hold Onto Yourself" and the sweet "Jesus Of The Moon", which vaguely recalls compatriots The Triffids' elegies to their beloved Australian outback.

There's a rolling, free and expansive feel to the album as a whole that is not only one of its most attractive features, but is also the most difficult thing about it to pin down. At times (as on the organ-stoked "Midnight Man"), Cave and co seem to look to Bob Dylan for their drive, not because their own has run out of steam, but through a desire to shift elements in a creative landscape that must be over familiar to The Bad Seeds themselves. As Cave sings on "Jesus Of The Moon": "People often talk about being scared of change / But for me, I'm more afraid of things staying the same." There is slim chance of that.

    by Sharon O'Connell