Pitchfork

For decades, Nick Cave, ringmaster of his own rock'n'roll circus, has been an unlikely paragon of routine. Not routine music, per se, but music made as part of a routine. Check in to the office, check out of the office. Repeat. Don't wait for your muse to come to you. Go to her first and demand she appear. Contrary to his reputation as a bit of a wild man, by his own account Cave's spent the past several years a man of discipline, with rules right down to what rules need be discarded, and when.

Grinderman, then, is Cave's considered decision to set aside those rules and make a sideways move into the realm of stripped down-- but far from mellow-- rock. Inspired by the creation of the most recent Bad Seeds release, Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, Cave took his cohorts Warren Ellis, Martyn Casey, and Jim Sclavunos into the studio to slash and burn their way through new ideas until they'd amassed enough for an album. Unlike Abattoir/Lyre however, Cave kept the remaining Bad Seeds on the sidelines and, rather than flesh out the results, left them raw and stinging, setting aside his piano in favor of guitar.

By doing so Cave has predictably invited comparisons to his first claim to fame, the Birthday Party-- and not without reason. Grinderman reveals Cave has rediscovered (or at least reembraced) the possibilities of the theatrical punk dirge, with arrangements that threaten to fly right off the rails.

But the Cave of the Birthday Party and the Cave of Grinderman are totally different beasts, and for that we can thank Cave's (yes) discipline-- as a writer, singer and as a bandleader. Grinderman are an indulgent study in excess, sure, but the twist is that at every turn Cave keeps the chaos carefully in check, emphasizing messiness when need be but also showcasing the deceptively precise playing of his band as well as his loose and at times gloriously silly lyrics.

The savage and snarling Birthday Party were as stark and nihilistic as the Bad Seeds are bombastic and apocalyptic, but Cave has never fully played the role of Prince of Darkness. As a songwriter he can be scary, moving, and intense, but thankfully Cave's rarely humorless. In fact, Cave's mirthfulness is one of his enduring gifts. He's the kind of guy who'll rhyme "Orpheus" with "orifice" not just because it's clever, but also because his inner Beavis & Butthead finds it funny.

Grinderman may be intended as a somewhat goofy reassertion of punk vigor and virility, but the disc is no laughing matter. "Get It On" starts the album in tease-mode, all build-up and no pay-off that nonetheless introduces the arsenal at hand: fuzzed out guitar, insistent rhythms, warts and all takes, oozing with animalistic sex and sleaze.

The many pleasures of "No Pussy Blues" have been praised for months, and rightly so: The song's hilarious, with Cave's pleas for sex grower stronger and stronger until he practically creams himself with indignation when his increasingly desperate romantic overtures go roundly rebuffed. It flirts with camp, especially with its typewriter intro, but who can complain when Cave and crew are clearly having so much fun?

Songs like this show why Grinderman probably wouldn't have worked as a full-fledged Bad Seeds project. It's just too concertedly unhinged, and despite the modest ranks of the reduced band there's hardly any room for anything else. The title track is a thick slab of Gothic VU blues, as perverse and insidious as any of Cave's other character pieces, its tortured guitar coda like twisting metal. "Go Tell the Women" proudly takes the piss as it revels in its own primitive stupidity-- it's self-parody and salacious blues tribute all in one. "Honey Bee (Let's Fly to Mars)" is Cave and crew's stab at a woozy, wobbly garage stomper, like many of the other Grinderman songs both a call to arms and a come-on. "Won't somebody touch me?" Cave demands as the world falls apart around him.

The exceptions serve as little breathers, breaks from the onslaught. "Electric Alice" is unlucky enough to follow "No Pussy Blues", so it would probably sound like a throw-away experiment in psychedelic loops and textures even it weren't a throw-away experiment in psychedelic loops and textures. The measured soul of "(I Don't Need You to) Set Me Free" and the familiar melodrama of "Man in the Moon" and "When My Love Comes Down" are prime Cave, but each marks a slight deviation from the Grinderman aesthetic. They're just a little too classy, too neat, despite the roaring undercurrent of musical violence in the last, which picks up right before the song cuts off.

That leaves the somewhat anticlimactic "Love Bomb", nonetheless a much better approximation of the death of the 60s fin de siecle vibe than anything on the embarrassing Stooges reunion disc. Yes, the lyrics split the difference between 21st century Doors portent and Iggy's own current pop-culture citing missteps. The difference is that Cave's winking delivery implies he recognizes that dumb is just a state of mind, and he's more than willing to subsume his smarts for the sake of the music. By taking one for the team and donning a Stooge-worthy dunce cap, Cave in turn gives us so much more, and frees up is Id to wreak glorious havoc.