Grinderman - Grinderman 2

Grinderman
Grinderman 2

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The second round of Grinderman mayhem opens with Nick Cave in midlife crisis mode, announcing to the universe, ‘I woke up this morning and I thought “what am I doing?”’ With the first Grinderman album (Cave’s sideproject with a few fellow Badseeds, principally Warren Ellis), many were left asking exactly that, dismissing it as little more than an exercise in grossly indulgent whining from a bunch of aging lotharios. But those who managed to discern the blaring self-parody underscoring the lewd posturing of songs like ‘No Pussy Blues’ will find much to enjoy in this sequel of razorbacked blues and whirring psychedelia.

The absurd deadpan tone of the first album is carried here by songs like first single ‘Heathen Child,’ Cave mocking the existential quandaries that plague the young with some surreal lyrics delivered with a leer and a snicker. But he’s at his best in the role of arch-seducer (aka dirty old man), like on ‘Worm Tamer’ or ‘Kitchenette’ – with lines like ‘I stick my fingers in your biscuit jar / and crush all your gingerbread men’ delivered in a voice dripping with post-peepshow mank.

Not that the lecherous and the grotesque are the only tones striven for here – they’re just the ones that Cave and co. seem to relish most. ‘When My Baby Comes’ contains all the mawkish desperation of the washed-up flip-side to the Grinderman persona; ditto the rasping pathos of ‘What I Know’.


There are misfirings sure, but if you’re in on the joke then Grinderman 2 is plenty fun. And if not, well, you can clean yourself up.


First published in The Brag, Iss. 377, August 30th 2010

The Drones @ The Annandale, 4th March ‘10

There is a forty-year old within my acquaintance who possesses an encyclopaedic knowledge of Australian rock, but does not care for The Drones.  As far as I can make out this is because their music ‘insists upon itself’.  They certainly have no time for raised eyebrows or tongue filled cheeks, but then they’ve certainly earned the right to be as unironic as they wish, filling the Annandale’s dank confines tonight with a suitably sweaty press.

Based on his support spot tonight, Jack Ladder on the other hand hasn’t quite got there.  The elements are in place, his Nick Cave circa Boatman’s Call warble interweaving nicely with some clean steel guitar.  The wildness wasn’t however and the set stagnated under the weight of its own seriousness, not helped by the at times dragging slowness of the songs themselves.

Perhaps it’s just that heavy material needs to feel lived in to be believable, which is exactly what Gareth Liddiard seems to understand.  His vocal delivery is a bodily event, skinny frame twitching with buttoned down agitation, raw lyrics chewed to mush and spagged back out.  He settled into a controlled rhythm, holding it together before unleashing the spastic, only breaking the spell between songs to clear his ravaged trachea.

The last few years of touring have honed the rest of the band into an equally focussed unit.  Taken as a whole, they were in the zone tonight, offering the crowd some of their best material, ‘Shark Fin Blues’, the spiky atonal Nintendo riff of ‘The Minotaur’ before encoring with Kev Carmody’s gut-wrenching ‘River of Tears’.  Riveting.


First published in The Brag, March 2010