Grinderman - Grinderman 2

It's hard not to smell conspiracy in Grinderman. Think about it: Nick Cave unleashes his primal rock side after over a decade of increased musical theatricality, forming a power quartet whose musical pedigree evokes the Birthday Party and is made up entirely out of fellow Bad Seeds – Martyn P Casey, Jim Sclavunos and Warren Ellis – but, significantly, doesn't include Mick Harvey. And then what happens? After one more Bad Seeds disc, and more than two decades at Cave's side, Harvey bails. Was Grinderman designed to force Mick's hand? Was it a snide message from Cave to his former foil to demonstrate that his new employees can do whatever his old partners could? It's a tantalising (and completely unsubstantiated) theory but if so, Grinderman is one of the best-sounding fuck-yous in musical history.

First thing to note is that Grinderman 2 is about a hundred times better than 2007's self-titled debut, which at times seemed like a drunken weekend project. In fact – and whisper it quietly – it's also a good deal better than the last few Bad Seeds albums. Cave has been liberated from his sonorous late-period croon and sounds loose and dangerous again while shifting from piano to guitar – an instrument he's nowhere near as adept at playing – has forced his voice and lyrics to make up the difference.

That being said, it also sounds a lot like the Bad Seeds much of the time:‘Heathen Child' has those trademark call-and-response gang vocals, the shuffling‘Palaces of Montezuma' could be an outtake from The Lyre of Orpheus while the thundering ‘Worm Tamer' would have immeasurably enlivened Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! It's not all aggressive, snarling guitars though: ‘What I Know' is barely there, evoking the Smog of Knock Knock, and ‘When My Baby Comes' is based around a circular pizzicato riff and looped layers of violin lines.

However, it's the return of Cave as the demented carny-barker-slash-fire'n'brimstone-revivalist-preacher that's the most wonderful thing about the album, from the declamatory "Baby, baby, baby, baby!" that opens ‘Evil' (and am I the only one who imagines a spoken intro of "I'm gonna tell you about a girl...") to the growl and purr of the slinky ‘Kitchenette'. And hell, how many other singers can throw "billabong" into a song and make it sound at once sexy and threatening? What this means for the next Bad Seeds disc remains to be seen, but goddamn Nick: it's good to have you back.

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