Pitchfork

This is how rock musicians are supposed to age. At 50, Nick Cave's hairline is receding, but he's turned that setback into a "look," growing out his locks and cultivating the coolest mustache in the industry. Over 30 years, first with the Birthday Party and then with the Bad Seeds, he has refined his lurid growl and lascivious subject matter-- the usuals: sex, death, God, murder, redemption, all in the most brutal and salaciously poetical terms possible-- without losing any of his charisma or menace. During the past decade alone, despite sounding hoarse on No More Shall We Part and Nocturama, he has transformed his swagger into a potent brand of musical and amoral authority, honing his persona in tandem with the Bad Seeds, who a few years ago were one of the tightest and most versatile backing bands around and have only gotten better with each release.

Prior to the recording of Cave's latest album, longtime guitarist/piano player Blixa Bargeld left the Bad Seeds and multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis, of the Dirty Three, assumed a more prominent role. So maybe it's the line-up changes, or even the thrown-down gauntlet of Cave's side project Grinderman, or perhaps some other unnamed stimulus, but the Bad Seeds sound even edgier and more sophisticated on Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, providing a fitting pulpit for their bandleader's ravings. With the emphasis on acoustic guitars with occasional blasts of electric static, there's little of the distortion that colored Grinderman's album, but plenty of odd noises and lewd organs that suggest some sort of twisted take on 1960s psych and garage rock. Cave and the Seeds kick out the jams, kick in the Doors. "Today's Lesson" and "Lie Down Here (& Be My Girl)" are fierce, yet lean, while ballads like "Moonland" and "Hold On to Yourself" offset that energy with eerie nocturnal ambience.

Just as surely as the 2004 double-decker Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus was Cave's England album-- steeped in imagery that's equal parts urban-miserable Dickens and pagan-pastoral Wicker Man-- Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! is his Americanized follow-up. He has always been interested in the darker corners of Americana, especially the Southern mythologies that informed early albums like From Her to Eternity and The Firstborn Is Dead, and Cave makes this collection an old-fashioned picaresque through exurban shopping malls, shuttered factories, and dilapidated ranches-- complete with Biblical overtones (and what's a Nick Cave album without those?). The opening title track, with its fierce strut and taunting floor-tom tattoo, opens on Lazarus newly resurrected, a fame junkie traipsing westward before ending up "back in the streets of New York, in a soup queue, a dope fiend, a slave." Cave spins the yarn not as a fire-and-brimstone sermon, but more like a sardonic Sunday school lesson-- and pretty funny to boot.

Even the writers Cave namedrops are almost exclusively Americans: Ernest Hemingway, Charles Bukowski, and John Berryman, whom Cave, like the Hold Steady and Okkervil River, extols beyond all others. To his considerable credit, Cave may be the only rock musician who convincingly doubles as a literary critic. Such pretensions are built into his persona and tempered with his awareness that rock and roll is ultimately low-brow and therefore a subversive vessel for high-bow concerns. In other words, he has a lot more to say about Lolita than Sting ever did. As on "There She Goes, My Beautiful World" on Abattoir Blues, Cave assails all things bookish on "We Call Upon the Author", a rip-roaring metafictional rocker that questions not only the need for suffering on Earth, but Cave's own fascination with it. Mingling lines like "myxamatoid kids spraddle the streets" with base puns like "I feel like a vacuum cleaner, a complete sucker," Cave implies the author in question might be himself or it might be God, which makes the song-ending shout all the ballsier: "Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!"

When Cave isn't editing the Bible, he's moving Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! westward-- the trajectory of so many American stories-- through the heartland and into the Southwest, through the hilariously iniquitous "Today's Lesson" and into "Albert Goes West", set in the "vast, indifferent deserts of Arizona." As always, it's a strange road trip, with Cave keeping the car between the lines while Ellis messes with the radio. Their collaboration has intensified over the fourteen years since the violinist joined the band for Henry's Dream, and Ellis has obviously called shotgun on Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! His strange noises color every track: the sinister wind-up music box sounds on "Today's Lesson", the gentle flute solo on the surprisingly tender "Jesus of the Moon", the delicate violin wheeze behind "Night of the Lotus Eaters". All of Cave's albums aim to unsettle, but rarely have he and the Bad Seeds managed to do it so efficiently, so gracefully, or so forcefully. It all culminates in the haunted closer "More News from Nowhere", on which Cave does Homer doing Dylan to sum up what sounds like his whole career. Ellis fiddles while America burns, and Cave sings, almost sweetly, "It's strange in here. Yeah, it gets stranger every year." Amen to that.