Wednesday, September 22nd 2010

Reviews:  Grinderman

Riding Shotgun Through Wolf Country

By Skwerl

Grinderman’s second album is a deranged, perverted, uncomfortable mess. We recommend it.

Grinderman 2, The 40 minute, 9 track simply-titled follow-up to the band’s 2007 eponymous debut pisses on the rule book, letting it all hang out. It’s raw art, rock and roll through and through. There are reckless stumbles here and there, but the highlights are glorious.

The opening track, entitled Mickey Mouse And The Goodbye Man is the most unhinged and insane of the bunch, also the most inspired, and certainly the most effective. Beyond a gentle guitar intro lies a simple but threatening bass riff, a sly promise of armed soldiers just out of sight. A brushed snare keeps time, highlighted by carefully placed tom pops and kick thumps. Cult leader Nick Cave rants passionately, incoherently:

Oh my brother / he starts raging / I watch him rising / I see him howling / And he sucked her and he sucked her and he sucked her dry / And he bit at me and bit at me and said goodbye / Up on the 29th floor…

And then he howls like a madman, and all hell breaks loose. The drums kick into high gear, and sweaty grimy distorted guitars tear into an aggressive and determined driving riff, a soundtrack to getting into (or perhaps out of) the worst kind of trouble.

The hardest thing about cracking this album is getting past this first track, that demands to be played over and over.

Worm Tamer follows, a sexy low-end-heavy groove, an estranged offspring of PJ Harvey and Tricky, raised by weird uncle Nick. While it’s far from skippable, there’s a fatal flaw, unfortunately; The song repeats an infectiously cool, catchy verse… Over and over, with barely a chorus to speak of. It relies entirely on this strength that would pack so much harder of a punch if delivered with the element of surprise.

Lead single Heathen Child is now placed into context. Like most of the album, its lyrics read like Gordon Lish’s Zimzum, crazed narratives of events that couldn’t have possibly transpired entirely outside of the mind of the narrator. The feeling and energy comes across, but there’s no telling what really happened. And you’re not so sure you want to know, anyway.

The song was almost ruined by the video, with literal visuals that became permanently connected to the formless lyrics. Would it perhaps be easier to appreciate a work of art without being forced to picture three deity-sized middle-aged men in Trojan armor, stomping around and blasting asteroids with lasers shooting from their eyeballs? Maybe so. Still, Heathen Child is a standout cut, more straightforward musically than Mickey Mouse, and a powerful single.

When My Baby Comes succeeds where Worm Tamer fell a little short. It’s an uncomplicated refreshment on the other side of the bathtub asteroids. The story told by the lyrics feels like far less of a hallucination than those of the previous songs, but there’s still a feeling that the storyteller, in a hospital gown, might be tragically alone in his reality: They had pistols and they had guns / They threw me on the ground as they entered into me / I was only fifteen / Just how long you gonna be, my baby? This memoir that comprises the first half of the song comes over light guitars and strings over shakers for percussion, before winding through a dark instrumental dirge guided by a distorted bass.

The trio of What I Know, Evil, and Kitchenette are found (sadly, yet conveniently grouped together) in the album’s weak middle, with a mixed bag of shortcomings. Evil and Kitchenette crank up the crazy dial but lose sight of the horizon line, spiraling away from the loose but tangible structures that hold together the first four songs. What I Know is little more than a creepy LiveJournal entry over some tinkered noise. It’s passable as music only as an interlude in context.

The album closes strong, however, with Palaces Of Montezuma and Bellringer Blues. The former is like Neil Diamond, Lou Reed, a little Bowie, and a dose of LSD all thrown into a blender, a mature pop song that could be there just to prove capability. It decisively does so, regardless, with oohs and aahs over piano tinkling, cultural references and an anthemic chorus: Come on baby / Let’s get out of the cold…

The album’s final track begins as complete dissonance, fractured and demented until the lyrics come in and the music carves out its own pocket, eventually becoming one of the most coherent songs on the album, actually, especially lyrically. Background vocals sing a hymn over a haunting chord progression: We are the soul survivors…

Grinderman 2 is by no means a flawless album, but it is a rare thing; It’s sincere, and pure. It’s an unbridled, not entirely unmolested work of artistic expression, and much more satisfying to these ears than the band’s debut. It can be disturbing and repellent at times. Sometimes you may feel like the music is overstepping its boundaries, invading your comfort zone a little. We applaud this. And we encourage you to challenge yourself by listening. For these strange, inspired men challenged themselves to create it.