Hellbound Hearts

You’ve probably heard Heathen Child. Whether you have a habit of listening to such music of your own free will or not (Jonathan Pierce, I am looking at you), you kinda feel obliged to admit that it is pretty much awesome. And kinda really cool. And when I say “kinda cool”, I am thinking of “mind-blowing, you’ll never be this cool so you’d better just stop trying now” kinda cool.

Now, most of the times, people have this thing where upon hearing the first single off an album, they will expect the album to be in a certain way. In our case, you’d probably expect Grinderman 2 to be dirty and free of structural inhibitions, Nick Cave howling over Warren Ellis’s crazy guitar. And, yes, you are mostly right. The four Grinderman shed all decency in the process of writing their second studio material. They are as shameless as they were on the first album when they made you forget all their musical baggage and beat all sense of wisdom out of their sound.

As always, Cave’s lyrics are a delicious mix between horrors imageries and black humour, tales of murder and rape, a stream of consciousness tour-de-force, mad one liners thrown at the listener and charming him like the words of a manic prophet. And be damn sure that you will smirk like Cave probably did when he dryly mused “My baby calls me the Loch Ness monster. Two great big humps and I'm gone.”

Forget about midlife crisis. The only crisis here is how much louder can the guitars be, how much can they swirl and create abrasive walls of psychedelia, how much could the organ be abused on the apocalyptic Bellringer Blues and how will ever anyone make a creepier song than the minimalist When My Baby Comes. There is no need to be shy about it: Grinderman 2 is the older and by no means wiser version of The Birthday Party, it is feral and untamed, proudly taking off from where the first offering left us.

It really is a far too visceral album for the faint of heart. The non believers will easily dismiss the album as another record about naughtiness and disobedience. Or, you know, the two things nasty blues is made of after all. But Grinderman 2 is not talking to them. It is talking to us out there who enjoy the marriage of noise and rhythm, scum rock and art that the wayward Grinderman preach about.