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Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!
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After the howling guitars, huge beards and gut-sucking pursuit of far younger ladies that characterised 2007’s Grinderman project, Nick Cave and his long-term pals have reverted to Bad Seeds and a touch of dignity.
Some elements of the scorching Grinderman album have hung around. There’s a sense of fun here – not always a mainstay of the previous 13 Bad Seeds albums – but we’re back to Cave the poet, Cave the laconic chronicler, and he’s being a bit more flowery about the rude stuff. That’s “Mr Sandman Inseminator/He opens her up like a love letter/And enters her dreams” (‘Today’s Lesson’ from DLD!!!) rather than “He drank panther p*** and f***ed the girls you’re married to” (‘Get It On’ from Grinderman). It’s a subtle distinction.
Cave’s lyrics are, as ever, a hugely quotable goodie bag – “When I came up from out of the meat locker, the city was gone” (‘Moonland’); “Dragons roam the shopping malls/I hear they’re going to eat our guts” (‘Night Of The Lotus Eaters’) – all technicolour imagery, vivid and haunting, but they’re couched in welcoming melodies too. ‘Albert Goes West’ is a pop song – no brooding religious fury here, just a radio-friendly rocker with breathy harmonies – and closer ‘More News From Nowhere’ is a soft rock slow burner that would be comfortable in Tom Petty’s canon.
There are clear triumphs. The title track, a hilarious reimagining of the second life of Lazarus, exhorts the comeback kid to “dig yourself back in that hole” to a catchy bluesy roll, and the absorbing rocker ‘We Call Upon The Author’ manages to make a smart-arsed chorus out of “prolix, prolix, nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix”. Yet DLD!!! is above all a captivating whole. At 50, Old Nick is more vital and tempting than ever.
Matthew Horton
