Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!

Artist	Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Format	CD
Genre	Rock
Label Name	Anti
Producer	Nick Launay, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
Release Date	2008 04 08
Song List	1: Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! (4:11) 2: Today's Lesson (4:41) 3: Moonland (3:53) 4: Night of the Lotus Eaters (4:53) 5: Albert Goes West (3:32) 6: We Call Upon the Author (5:11) 7: Hold on to Yourself (5:50) 8: Lie Down Here (And Be My Girl) (4:57) 9: Jesus of the Moon (3:22) 10: Midnight Man (5:06) 11: More News from Nowhere (7:58)
Style.Categories	Alternative Singer/Songwriter, Experimental Rock, Garage Rock, Rock & Roll

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Apparently, the Bad Seeds side project Grinderman injected some serious adrenaline into the equation, evidenced mightily on Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! This is the 14th album by Nick Cave and company. After the masterpiece that was Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus in 2004, Cave and Warren Ellis scored a pair of films -- The Proposition and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and recorded the self-titled Grinderman album with other bandmembers Martyn Casey and Jim Sclavunos. Grinderman was a howling, raucous, rock & roll racket of a set that sweat humorous garage rock blues and raw shambolic guttersnipe stroll that spread its nasty cheer to the listener. The return of the full-on Bad Seeds octet builds on this energy and emerges with an album that is at once snarling, darkly humorous, decadently sexual, and, if you are a religious Christian person, seemingly blasphemous. An obvious example is the title track that opens the album. As always, Cave's lyrics are at the center. They are the focus whether he wants them to be or not, and they certainly are here. The track kicks off with a low-end, loose-limbed bass slog and snarling guitar swagger that simultaneously recall Link Wray and Johnny Thunders. Cave re-introduces the biblical character that Jesus raised from the dead as Larry. Larry gets resurrected in the 21st century. He is utterly lost as he rambles about, utterly disoriented and wondering why the hell he was woken from his dream sleep in the first place. (Think Martin Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ set in the current day with its Lazarus stumbling around half blind and lost, one foot here, one in the next world.) Larry, who no longer has a sense of who or where he is, partakes of every greasy pleasure known -- sex, dope, violence -- and ends up in the joint, and eventually homeless before ending up back in his hole in the ground. Cave wryly explains at the end, "poor Larry." There are bullhorn sounds in the backdrop, sheer noise wafting in from the margins, and the band pumping itself up with every verse. Cave talks more than he sings here, he's reciting something that feels free form but it's rhythmically dead-on and very tightly focused.
Tracy Pew of the Birthday Party could have played the bass rumble that introduces "Today's Lesson." It's all popping riff, one line played over and over as the band brings out organs, acoustic and electric guitars, Ellis playing an electric mandolin, and Cave offering the tale of a young woman who wakes from a dream with a jawbone stuck inside the waistband of her jeans like a gun, who has been repeatedly violated in her sleep by the sandman; when she wakes up all hell breaks loose in the form of a "real good time tonite." She's ready to party, to get while the getting's good -- you are free to interpret whatever that might be.
Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! isn't all clamorous craziness, however. For starters, it's not as raw as Grinderman. Nick Launay reins it in while extending the textural and dimensional reach of the Bad Seeds wonderfully rootsy yet complex and swampy sound. There are many different kinds of songs here, like the creepy crawly "Night of the Lotus Eaters" that feels like Night of the Living Dead meets Hammer studios meets the Voodoo Gods of Haiti on 'ludes and cheap wine. It's dark, sinister, slimy, and addictive. "Albert Goes West" suggests the Dream Syndicate at their wildest with squalling guitars. When he says "The light upon the rainy streets/Offers Many Reflections/And I won't be held responsible/for my actions..." only to the same protagonist asks in a Concord bar "Do you wanna dance?/Do you wanna groove?" He means it.