Grinderman formed in 2005 when Nick Cave was writing material for the Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds album “Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus”. Featuring Martyn Casey on bass, Warren Ellis on violin and guitar, and Jim Sclavunos on drums, the band crafted songs together. In 2006, they entered a London studio and began a marathon session of song writing and demo recording. Aiming to recreate the rawer, more primal sound of Cave’s acclaimed post-punk project “The Birthday Party,” Grinderman’s lyrics and music were a significant departure from Nick Cave’s earlier work with The Bad Seeds.
The following April, they recorded the best of these new songs and, with the help of their longtime friend and producer Nick Launay, recorded an album.
Their eleven-song debut album, “Grinderman“, released on March 5th, 2007, received critical acclaim and included the singles “No Pussy Blues” and “Get It On.” The quartet reunited in 2009 to record Grinderman 2, released in 2010. In December 2011, Cave announced the band’s dissolution at a music festival in Australia.
When Grinderman released their debut in 2007, Nick Cave, Warren Ellis, Jim Sclavunos, and Martyn Casey created a reckless, drunken animal of an alter ego to the Bad Seeds. The album bridged territory mined by everyone from the Stooges to Suicide to Bo Diddley.
Again recorded in the company of producer Nick Launay, “Grinderman 2” is a more polished and studied affair than its predecessor, but it’s a more sonically adventurous, white-hot rock & roll record. The opening, “Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man,” comes closest to the songs on the previous album, but feels like it comes by way of Patti Smith’s “Radio Ethiopia,” Howlin’ Wolf, and the Scientists. It’s pure scummy, sleazy, in-the-red dissonant rock.
The swampy, ribald blues of “Kitchenette,” features Casey’s bass roiling around distorted, Echoplexed electric guitar, electric bouzouki, and jungle-like tom-toms and kick drums. Cave does his best lecher-in-heat blues howl — if Charles Bukowski had sung the blues, this is what it would have sounded like.
“Worm Tamer” is a thundering, interlocked coil of triple-note vamps on electric guitar and violin; there’s an organ that sounds like Sun Ra playing in a burlesque theatre, and an elastic groove in the rhythm section that threatens to take the entire thing off the rails, but purposely never does. While the controlled feedback suggests the earliest sounds of the Bad Seeds live, the layered harmony vocals and tautly held tension between rhythm and lead instruments — all on stun — reveal a disciplined sophistication.
With its expansive textural and atmospheric palette, and deliberately studied dynamic bombast, “Grinderman 2” still contains an overdose of rock and roll adrenaline and is drenched in comic sleaze, but it also sounds like a new, more experimental direction for the band more than it does a continuation of its predecessor.
The Fat Angel Sings 