Mr Impostume, the Blog-reading public needs to know, are you now or have you ever been…. a Nick Cave fan?

Well…intermittently, though I found the sheer laziness of “Nocturama”, especially the justifiably reviled “Rock of Gibraltar” (“I met her in June, I bought her a spoon, we got married soon, then I looked at the moon,”) so hard to forgive that I never got round to checking out the apparently great “Abattoir Blues” at all, though I suspect Cave, having now entered the Pantheon will have the obligatory “Laughably Past It/ Stunning Return to Form” verdict passed on alternate releases until the day he’s interred in the great Bloooze Mausoleum in the sky along with Hank, Lenny, Bobby, et al. It was evident by the time the clunkily, cod-classically entitled “ And no more shall we part” (Nay and verily forsooth thrice nay shall we oh betrothed one!) that Cave was a spent force, his Apocalyptic baroque having modulated into a Mathew Arnoldish melancholy for a fallen world, (oh love, let us stay true to one another!) from Southern Gothic to sheepish Anglicanism in but a few years. While his much trumpeted marriage might have been a great way to keep Old Nick from worrying the heavy-duty padlocks on family medicine chest before breakfast had even been served, it seemed pretty disastrous for his song writing* (yes, that’s right I blame women and their petty domestic demands for emasculating the great Romantic artist that is man!) The muse now had to take her shoes off in the hall every time she came round and make polite small talk about how well the Azaleas were doing. The bowl of vomit that Cave claimed he was thematically chained to seemed to have been surreptitiously replaced with syrup, or worse still a very large mug of Ovaltine. In other words that most destructive of all middle-aged infirmities, contentment, had well and truly set in.

What then are we to make of “Grinderman,”** “Foul-mouthed, noisy, hairy, and damn well old enough to know better,” Cave's attempt along with a couple of members of the Bad Seeds to rock out, kick ass, inject some guitar-based venom and vitriol into the sedate body politic of Coldplayed-out contemporary rock, to jack up again on the fire and brimstone of old ? Cave’s "Tin Machine”? A horribly public Mid-life crisis, Cave trying to prove that he can still thrash around in the beer dregs and scream the blood vessels in his eyeballs black as good as any young pretender (“I ain’t gots so old I cain’t lick any wun a you ornery young pups yet”, mumbles old Pa Cave on his way out of the dressing room.) Well, what indeed? The track the band put up on their MySpace page, “No Pussy Blues” seemed promising. It was of course largely ruined by Caves prolixity and general desire to be a scurrilous old wag, but there was a silvered, scraping weight to the big wah-wah riff that kicked in halfway through and even if the rhythm section was a trudge through a muddy Berkshire field in oversized Wellies, the possibility was there that an album’s worth of this stuff might up the ante and crank out some tastily souped up, squalling and squawking dirty Rawk. While it wasn’t going to be “Mutiny in Heaven” part two at least you could imagine that they might have a few nasty, guttural Garage tricks up their sleeve.

“Foul-mouthed, noisy, hairy, and damn well old enough to know better.” Does it do what it says on the tin? As it stands it’s fulfilled fifty-percent of the bargain,“hairy, and damn well old enough to know better.” “No Pussy Blues” is not so much a taster of the album as its standout track. Bathos soughs horribly around in even the most generous listener as one track shuffles politely into the next and the promised noise and foulness fail to materialise. The percentage of hard-fast-loud tracks to lugubruious and sub-Bad Seedsy, love-is-redemptive, Winter-sunlight-in-the-conservatory windows, bathchair crooning is approximately fifty- fifty though sometimes it's hard to tell the two apart. The first track, the album presumably blasting off with evil fuzz-voodoo intensity, is just embarrassingly weak, and in Cave’s attempts to be both a Hellfire-fueled rabble-rouser as well as, you know, the grand-old-man-of-letters, deeply misjudged. Lyrically Leonard Cohen enervates the later Nick Cave in the same way Flannery O’Conner and Faulkner invigorated his earlier work in the Birthday Party and that wry, salacious, social-commentary side of Cohen ( “ First we take Manhattan” “The Future”, of which Cave is only ever a pale imitation anyway) dominates his performance on “Grinder man.” “All we wanted was a little consensual rape in the afternoon and maybe a bit more in the evening. We are scientists. We do genetics,” he deadpans on the plodding “Go tell the women.” On “Love Bomb” (all the titles are appalling, by the way) a “rocky” number, the pitfalls of Cave’s matrimonial life provide a series of mildly amusing diversions while the band trot out something that the Gun Club or the Fuzztones would probably have stuck on a B-side. During the moderately groovy,“Honey Bee,” he imitates a honey bee. “Honey bee let’s fly to Mars. BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!”And this from the man who gave us, “ Oh god, please let me die beneath her fists!”

Nick Cave will never be entirely unwelcome round Impostume heights, we’ve known each other too long, and “Grinderman” is pleasant enough to listen to while you’re doing the ironing (not that I ever iron my clothes obviously. I don’t even wear clothes, I’m THAT rock and roll) certainly unlikely to loose him any listeners but equally unlikely to get back anyone who gave up after “ From Her to Eternity.”

So what are the Blogs saying, what’s the grassroots’ buzz?

Buy that Drones*** album instead.



* Clearly it’s not marriage per se that’s the problem, look at David Thomas****, never been more rancorous as far as I can make out. The problem is clearly being happily married.

** “ But surely that’s not released until next March, Mr Impostume!” Errrr..let’s just say it fell off the back of a lorry on the Information Super-highway.

*** Although hunting down a copy of “Ascension” by The Aints would probably make The Drones entire output instantly redundant.

**** After a recent Ubu gig during which Mr Thomas had ripped the filters off the pack of Marlboro he was chain smoking and, shall we say, comprehensively abused the audience (looked like it was going to be a fistfight at one point) I drunkenly and possibly foolishly complimented Mr Thomas on his recent, significant weight loss (he could now even move actual parts of his own body!) . “ I got a year to live,” he informed me.