Gets stranger every year: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!

When I heard that Nick Cave was planning to take what he had done with Grinderman and apply it to The Bad Seeds for his 2008 release, I think my heart stopped out of sheer ecstasy. Grinderman swooped in last year in a blaze of testosterone and left many of us dizzy. So, I have been completely unable to keep my buttocks in my seat while waiting for Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!.

Unfortunately, I feel like Dig ,Lazarus, Dig!!! is less inspired by the experiment in balls-out garage rock of Grinderman and more influenced by the rock of the 1960s and 70s. When I put it on, I feel like Cave was more thinking he was Mick Jagger and The Bad Seeds were The Rolling Stones. It feels very much like a Stones album in tone, with a bit of vaguely Doors-like electric organs thrown in for good measure. “Hold On To Yourself” and “Midnight Man” may as well be Doors songs. “Jesus Of The Moon” stands out for sounding like the vein of music that Cave has been doing with The Bad Seeds for the past couple albums; while it’s certainly good, it doesn’t really fit in with the rest of the album. “Moonland” sounds like it was yanked out of a Dirty Harry movie. The title track sounds like it wandered in drunk off the Vegas strip. “Lie Down Here (And Be My Girl)” reminds me a bit of “Hey Ya!”

While none of this is necessarily a bad thing, it just strikes me as being something other than what was advertised. I was hoping for the wild intensity of Grinderman to shine through this album, and what I got was half an album of the Grinderman dirtiness and the other half an odd anachronism. However, the music is tight and Cave hasn’t lost his touch with lyrics. “We Call Upon The Author” is quite the work of genius, and, if you don’t think that “Albert Goes West” isn’t a prime track for driving off into the sunset (or sunrise, as per the lyrics) like some romanticized Hollywood ideal, then you seriously have to reassess your rock standards. “Night of The Lotus Eaters” echoes the sort of building-towards-a-climax that we saw in Grinderman’s “Electric Alice.” It’s certainly an album worth listening to and playing repeatedly for a week, even if it isn’t what we were sold on.

While we were also told this was going to be a reinterpretation of the tale of Lazarus, I find the various Greek mythological references to be more fascinating. Lotus eaters, “More News From Nowhere” being a larger condensed variation of The Odyssey, and so on lead me to believe that Mr. Cave was reading a bit more of Homer than the Bible while he was sitting down to put this album together. As an unrepentant literature geek, I really like the assorted literary references and personalities that make appearances throughout.

As Mr. Cave’s music is very literary in nature, I find it most helpful that it comes with a solid lyric booklet. Scratch that; not a booklet, a book. I was originally under the impression that the American release wasn’t going to come with printed lyrics, that it was going to be packaged like Grinderman was last year. Despite the fact that I loved Grinderman, I absolutely despised the fact that it was issued in such a lackluster package. One measly picture of the band inside the gatefold and no printed lyrics left me rather disappointed, and I was informed by a friend that Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! was going to be issued in America in a similar fashion. I was fully prepared weeks ago to rant about how Nick Cave hates America and wanted to deny us his words in a printed format. Thankfully, that theory has been proven wrong, since the only currently available American edition is identical to the European special edition. Perhaps this will change; the currently available American is listed as a special and limited edition, so perhaps ANTI- (the American distributor for this album) will do as was done with Tom Waits’ Orphans, i.e. special edition comes out first and then the less fantastic regular edition comes out later. In any event, I am glad that an edition featuring printed lyrics is available since Nick Cave is one of the best lyricists of our time. His work is pure poetry, and deserves to be read as much as it is listened to.

Some of you may be wondering why I quibble so often about printed lyrics. Consider this experience that is similar no doubt to one of your own: at one point, I wanted to share the Joy Division song “Interzone” with a college professor while we were studying Naked Lunch. I went on the internet, and, after some fishing around, found three completely different interpretations of the song before giving up on the idea entirely. Not providing a definitive set of lyrics opens up opportunities for such anomalies and misinterpretations and strikes me as being a terrible insult to the songwriter. Considering the literary nature of this album, I cannot praise Mute, ANTI-, and Cave himself enough for providing the lyrics in such an elegant format so as to prevent some clueless jerk from posting online what he thinks the words are.

To reiterate what I said in my Haale review, cutbacks in product quality aren’t encouraging towards purchasing the album in a physical form. While I understand piracy is cutting into the record labels profits, and independent labels feel that bite the most, making a sub-par product isn’t going to help matters. In fact, it is more likely to swing people to bootleg more often since there’s not much incentive to purchasing. With Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, the labels involved had the good sense to create a worthwhile product that (although consuming a bit more space on the shelf) is worth owning physically as opposed to digitally.

Setting aside my soapbox, I find this to be one of the best releases of the year thus far. Peerless songwriting, catchy riffs, and the ambiance surrounding Cave and The Bad Seeds make for a damn fine album.



Their website and myspace and blah blah blah.

1st impression: The Kills, Midnight Boom

The Kills’ Midnight Boom was so good I held off going to the bathroom until it was done, despite the fact that I really had to go. Squirming in my seat, alternately from excitement about the music and the building pressure in my bladder, I just couldn’t bear missing one minute. Now, I know bugger all about this band aside from sitting here and listening to what’s coming out of the speakers, but really, when the music excites you, what else do you need to know?

The music is of the garage rock/lo-fi indie variety, with elements of pop, punk, electronica and other little experiments including hand claps and coughed-up lungs working their way into the mix for sh**s and giggles. With Midnight Boom, it’s hard to pick out favorite tracks since they’re all so short. By the time I come to the realization, “I like this song,” it’s over and the next one is halfway through playing. The songs themselves lend some difficulty to pigeonhole this into any one genre, which I don't mind in the slightest; I'd rather a band take some chances than bore me with a lack of variety. However, while the majority of the album is busy kicking you in the pants repeatedly from odd angles, the last track, “Goodnight Bad Morning,” is a quiet little acoustic number and a really nice way to close out the album. Everything else, though, insists on grabbing you by the throat and not letting you go.

I’m putting this down as a first impression rather than a full review since I don’t have the actual album in my hands. The entirety of Midnight Boom is posted on the band’s myspace page, and it’s rather detrimental to the experience to jump back and forth between Firefox and a review in progress. Since you can go listen to it yourself, a review seems rather pointless, but I wanted to at least gush for a little about how much I am enjoying what I’ve heard.

My only complaint is that the album is only slightly over a half an hour long. I prefer albums to be around 40-50 minutes so as to really get into the music. Some really good tracks on Midnight Boom, such as “M.E.X.I.C.O.,” are criminally short. But what the hell, it doesn’t overstay its welcome, and gives you a one-two punch in the kidneys before pissing its name on your music collection and skipping away merrily. I’m looking forward to this release on Tuesday, March 18^th, and I hope you are too.

The Kills official website
The Kills myspace page