Grinderman | ||
| Allmusic Biography : While Nick Caves music has evolved from the harrowing post-punk wail of the Birthday Party to the eloquent and often poetic approach he explored on the albums The Boatmans Call and No More Shall We Part with his group the Bad Seeds, the troublemaking noise merchant of his youth has never entirely gone away, and in 2006 Cave founded Grinderman to give this side of his musical personality a new outlet. Grinderman came to be when Cave was writing material in 2004 for his acclaimed album Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus. Tired of writing in his office at home and then presenting the material to the Bad Seeds, Cave decided to try a new approach by teaming up with bandmembers Martyn Casey on bass, Warren Ellis on violin and guitar, and Jim Sclavunos on drums and working up songs as a group. With Cave improvising lyrics and playing guitar while his bandmates built melodies around them, the musicians began veering off into more experimental territory. Whipping up a potent dose of elemental music rooted in blues, punk, and no wave, the foursome created something wholly separate from the Bad Seeds, with an energy and emotional fury that pointed to the path-breaking music of their pasts while belying the maturity of the participants. Cave and his partners decided to give the new music an identity of its own, and Grinderman was born. In February 2006, the band went into a studio in London and began a marathon session of writing and demoing material; the following April, they took the cream of these new songs and recorded an album with the help of producer Nick Launay. The first Grinderman tune, "No Pussy Blues," was released to the Internet in the fall of 2006; a limited-edition vinyl single of "Get It On" was issued in February 2007, with Grindermans 11-song debut album following that spring. The band played a select number of dates to promote the album, which was critically as well as commercially successful. The quartet reconvened in 2009 to record Grinderman 2, which was released in 2010. In December of 2011, Cave announced the bands breakup at a music festival in Australia. Grinderman 2 RMX, collection of remixes from their second album, was released in the spring of 2012. | ||
 | Album: 1 of 3 Title: Grinderman Released: 2007-01 Tracks: 11 Duration: 40:03 Scroll: Up Down Top Bottom 25% 50% 75% Spotify Wikipedia Allmusic AlbumCover | 1 Get It On (03:07) 2 No Pussy Blues (04:20) 3 Electric Alice (03:15) 4 Grinderman (04:33) 5 Depth Charge Ethel (03:47) 6 Go Tell the Women (03:24) 7 (I Dont Need You to) Set Me Free (04:06) 8 Honey Bee (Lets Fly to Mars) (03:18) 9 Man in the Moon (02:10) 10 When My Love Comes Down (03:32) 11 Love Bomb (04:26) |
| Grinderman : Allmusic album Review : After the epic proportions of Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus double-disc in which Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds laid out two sides of the songwriters melodic and ambitious look at both rock & roll and balladry, Grinderman sounds like a wild, nasty, wooly rock & roll monolith who simply need to let it rip and then see what happens. Along with Warren Ellis, Martyn P. Casey and Jim Sclavunos (right, 3/7 of the Bad Seeds), Cave and company turn in a squalling, raucous, twist-and-turn garage band set that takes on all comers. Check out the opening line of the single "No Pussy Blues" for clues as to why the songwriting screenwriter (and seriously B-grade actor) may be doing this -- the sounds of a typewriter plunking only to be joined by a Sclavunos hi hat before Cave prattles in spoken word with real menace: "My face is finished, my bodys gone, and I cant help thinking but think standing up here with all this applause and gazing down at all the young and beautiful with looking up with their questioning eyes/That I must above all things love myself..." Joined by a snarling bass, he goes on to try to woo some young woman in the crowd with all his tricks, from sucking in his gut and getting all togged up to quoting her Yeats to doing her dishes and sending her doves, but he is rejected. The wail of age is fraught with both danger and delight as he continues his desperate and unsuccessful attempt at seduction, but all he ends up with is the "no pussy blues." It adds up to two things: black humor and a love for the kind of rock & roll younger musicians have to plot, plan, pose and dig deep into their record collections to try and emulate. When the band jumps in with all the racket unleashed, the track is as tragically funny as it is unhinged. The singers frustration is understood and empathized with to the point of sheer vitriol. And its a careening jolt of rock & roll that would send his listeners to the volume control for more. The opening track "Get It On" is similar but even wilder: it comes bursting out of the box like a rabid wolf. Even on the slower tunes such as "Electric Alice," a story-song, the grimy organ sounds and Ellis distorted bouzouki and violin meet the slippery mud shuffle of Sclavunos drums and Caseys plodding, droning bassline. All of this said, there are moments here, such as on "Depth Charge Ethel" and "Honey Bee (Lets Fly to Mars") where Grinderman are so freaking awesome they transcend the garage band thing altogether and sound like some flipped-out cross between Suicide, the Stooges, Bo Diddley and the Scientists. The songs come through and stand on their own amid the noise, so dont be surprised if some of these evil little nuggets get new treatments when the Bad Seeds reconvene. While the sound of pure snarl and glee is what melts the speaker cabinets the most, the overdriven menace of most these songs doesnt undermine their worth as songs. Cave is far too gifted for that and his bandmates are too empathetic to let him veer too far off course. The album closes with "Love Bomb," with Cave railing on electric guitar. Its a pumping anthem of pure male libidinal dis-ease that takes the sentiments of "No Pussy Blues" to the extreme, though Bob Dylan could have written the words. Its an anthem of male malaise, dysfunction, the rage at emasculation and desire. In fact, the protagonist in most of these songs is literally sick with it, and so is almost all of the music itself here. Grinderman, not the Bad Seeds, are the most logical -- though not necessarily similar-sounding or serious -- extension of the Birthday Party legacy Cave left behind 25 years ago. These are songs to chew on, get knocked down by, guffaw at, and take deep inside your own shadow side to celebrate. Grinderman is the impure rock & roll album to beat in 2007. | ||
 | Album: 2 of 3 Title: Grinderman 2 Released: 2010-09-10 Tracks: 9 Duration: 41:17 Scroll: Up Down Top Bottom 25% 50% 75% Spotify Wikipedia Allmusic AlbumCover | 1 Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man (05:42) 2 Worm Tamer (03:13) 3 Heathen Child (04:59) 4 When My Baby Comes (06:48) 5 What I Know (03:19) 6 Evil (02:55) 7 Kitchenette (05:16) 8 Palaces of Montezuma (03:32) 9 Bellringer Blues (05:30) |
| Grinderman 2 : Allmusic album Review : When Grinderman released their debut in 2007, Nick Cave, Warren Ellis, Jim Sclavunos, and Martyn Casey created a reckless, drunken animal of an alter ego to the Bad Seeds. The album bridged territory mined by everyone from the Stooges to Suicide to Bo Diddley. Again recorded in the company of producer Nick Launay, Grinderman 2 is a more polished and studied affair than its predecessor, but its a more sonically adventurous, white-hot rock & roll record. The opening, "Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man," comes closest to the songs on the previous album, but feels like it comes by way of Patti Smiths "Radio Ethiopia," Howlin Wolf, and the Scientists. Its pure scummy, sleazy, in-the-red dissonant rock. The swampy, ribald blues of "Kitchenette," features Caseys bass roiling around distorted, Echoplexed electric guitar, electric bouzouki, and jungle-like tom-toms and kick drums. Cave does his best lecher-in-heat blues howl -- if Charles Bukowski had sung the blues, this is what it would have sounded like. "Worm Tamer" is a thundering, interlocked coil of triple-note vamps on electric guitar and violin; theres an organ that sounds like Sun Ra playing in a burlesque theater, and an elastic groove in the rhythm section that threatens to take the entire thing off the rails, but purposely never does. While the controlled feedback suggests the earliest sounds of the Bad Seeds live, the layered harmony vocals and tautly held tension between rhythm and lead instruments -- all on stun -- reveal a disciplined sophistication. The single "Heathen Child," with its darkly comedic lyrics built from the slithering, funky rhythm-section-down mix, is as infectiously hooky as it is blasphemous; Ellis careening bouzouki here is among the more delightfully threatening rock sounds to emerge from a stringed instrument in ages. Grinderman can do a slow burn as well, evidenced by "When My Baby Comes," as Caves theatrically bawdy lyrics are delivered over the ensembles space rock drone. Nothing really prepares the listener for "Bellringer Blues," though. It sounds akin to Loop, Spiritualized, and Ash Ra meeting careening 21st century garage rock, as distortedm backmasked loops of guitar, organ and drums drive spooky chanted vocals thatchurn, rumble and crack in response. With its expansive textural and atmospheric palette, and deliberately studied dynamic bombast, Grinderman 2 still contains an overdose of rock and roll adrenaline and is drenched in comic sleaze, but it also sounds like a new, more experimental direction for the band more than it does a continuation of its predecessor. | ||
 | Album: 3 of 3 Title: Grinderman 2: RMX Released: 2012-03-26 Tracks: 12 Duration: 59:43 Scroll: Up Down Top Bottom 25% 50% 75% Spotify Allmusic AlbumCover | 1 Super Heathen Child (06:30) 2 Worm Tamer (A Place to Bury Strangers remix) (03:26) 3 Bellringer Blues (Nick Zinner remix) (04:30) 4 Hyper Worm Tamer (05:57) 5 Mickey Bloody Mouse (Joshua Homme remix) (04:14) 6 When My Baby Comes (Cat’s Eyes with Luke Tristram) (05:28) 7 Palaces of Montezuma (Barry Adamson remix) (05:00) 8 Evil (Silver Alert remix) (04:06) 9 When My Baby Comes (SixToes remix) (05:34) 10 Heathen Child (Andrew Weatherall bass mix) (06:48) 11 Evil (‘The Michael Cliffe House’ remix) (04:50) 12 First Evil (03:14) |
| Grinderman 2: RMX : Allmusic album Review : Grindermans second remix collection features collaborations and reinterpretations, and of course remixes of songs from Grinderman 2. The cast is interesting: Robert Fripp, Nick Zinner, Barry Adamson, Andrew Weatherall, Joshua Homme, UNKLE, and more. Asking whether or not this collection is desirable is completely different than asking if its necessary. The answer to the former obviously depends on how big a Grinderman fan you are -- or if you are a completist of any of the other artists included here. There are some interesting moments: hearing Fripp cut loose on guitar over "Super Heathen Child" is a nice touch and revs it up considerably, nearly taking it off the rails. Adamsons "Palaces of Montezuma" significantly livens up -- and humanizes -- what was otherwise a boring cut. Weatheralls "Heathen Child" completely deconstructs, dubs out, breaks up, and remakes the tune in his own image -- what a remix is supposed to do. It would have made a great B-side to the single version. This brings us back to the second question: was this necessary? The short answer is not by a long shot. The reason -- other than the obvious one that remix albums almost never work out -- is that there are too many takes of too few songs: three of "Evil" -- including one by Grinderman itself called "First Evil," which is a total throwaway -- take up a full fourth of the recording. Add to this two remixes each of "Worm Tamer (though UNKLEs "Hyper Worm Tamer" is alright) and "When My Baby Comes," and of course, the pair of "Heathen Child"s here -- no thanks. An EP might have worked, but apparently Grinderman had to milk it for all it was worth. | ||