GRINDERMAN GRINDERMAN (MUTE/ANTI-)
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Loving music at 30, you realize how few songs are about life on the other side of 26–and how most of the ones you can find are sickeningly nostalgic for youth. It’s not sexy, it’s not rock ‘n’ roll, to dwell on the soft terror of getting older–no one addresses the feeling of life receding from under your feet. Well, except for Nick Cave.
To paraphrase the Hold Steady, it’s good to see Nick Cave back in a bar band. In his new four-piece, Grinderman, which recently released its self-titled debut, Cave rips off the distinguished-gentleman mask and shows us he’s still the same greasy, swaggering pervert he was 30 years ago. The suave crooning and piano ballads are eighty-sixed in favor of burning basement buzz and a blizzard of wah. (Cave plays guitar all over this record, a first for him.) The rest of the band–a dream lineup for people who give a shit about Aussie punk–consists of Cave’s longtime rhythm section from the Bad Seeds, bassist Martyn Casey and drummer Jim Sclavunos, plus Warren Ellis, violinist of the Dirty Three and a Bad Seed in good standing himself. They may self-identify as old duffers, but they still have menace in ’em. Grinderman is a midlife-crisis record, its sinewy feedback and vulgar wisdom the punk-rock equivalent of a hot red convertible.
Of course all Winehouse really wants is a man to call her own, though she often scuttles her own desires with her willful ways. Cave, for his part, would settle for “a little consensual rape in the afternoon and then again in the evening.” Taken together, these two albums suggest that the big difference between 23 and 49–the ugly elephant standing on the coffee table while everyone talks about their kids and their condos–is between more fucking than you can handle and having to beg someone to so much as take notice of you.
