Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
life begins at..., 2 Mar 2008
The last album from Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, 'The Lyre of Orpheus/Abbatoir Blues' was amazing. Given the space of a double album we got to hear their full range from the gospel choir backed Get Ready For Love to the tender Babe, You Turn Me On. I played it again and again, consistently amazed by the sheer energy captured. I used to think Nick Cave was a bit rubbish once upon a time. I'd only seen him a couple of times, once duetting with Kylie Minogue, and to my ears he seemed to be having trouble hitting the notes. Talk about missing the point. Cave may not have the best voice in the world but, boy, does he know how to deliver a song. He also writes some of the best lyrics going, real storytelling through song, and a wicked sense of humour running through it all.
So now that the man himself has turned 50 what should we expect from the latest studio album? A maturing outlook, an album of reflection, a pipe and slippers? Of course not. This new album is a little harder in sound, influenced by last years Grinderman project. The title track gets things underway with a swagger and the risen Lazarus now in modern day New York and, by the end of the track, a dope fiend. As Cave shouts, 'He never asked to be raised up from the tomb'. Night Of The Lotus Eaters has an extraordinary bass line, reminiscent of the kind of backing Tricky used to great effect on his early albums building a sense of rhythmic unease. The same kind of repetitive beat is used on We Call Upon The Author, a lyrically adventurous rant about the very act of writing which uses one of The Bad Seeds great strengths the choral shout, the call to listeners which involves you in the music you're listening to.
It isn't all garage rock. Hold On To Yourself sounds much more like the gentle brilliance of The Lyre Of Orpheus and Jesus Of The Moon is quite beautiful, hiding an emotional 'punch in the heart' amongst its simple strings and flute. The range of playing, especially from the multi-talented Warren Ellis, is as exciting as that previous double album and what it lacks in depth it almost makes up for in brilliant lyrics and sheer sense of humour. Nick Cave has the kind of creative momentum and confidence going at the moment that bands a fraction of his age would kill for. Happy 50th!
|
|
|
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Bad Seeds continue to germinate spectacular fruit, 16 Mar 2008
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are incapable of making a poor album .Dig Lazarus Dig , their 14th , doesn't break their hot trot either . Even so it's the album most in thrall to another facet of Nick Cave's muse. The Grinderman side project has infused this album with a scouring malevolence and deep and dirty ambience. It throbs with subterranean deep bass lines, brutal slashes of guitar and stick on bones percussion. The up-tempo songs have the acerbic impact of a rusty shiv while the slower numbers crawl with serpentine grace allowing Cave more space to exhort his usual bevy of words about exotic and fertile characters .
Dig Lazarus Dig , as well as being populated with Caves usual colourful array of characters is possibly his most comic album to date .Larry off the brilliant churning riff title track is some kind of celebrity flailing round American cities . "Mr Sandman The Inseminator" enters the dreams of "Little Janie" to pulsating blues bass and shivery mandocaster on "Today's Lesson". "Midnight Man" features ...well the Midnight Man to Mick Harvey's relentless equilibrating organ.
Pitter pattering conga , quivering cuica and Martyn P Casey's thumping bass usher the first person "MoonLand" while "Night Of The Lotus Eaters" has the most sepulchral bass on a Nick Cave album since "From Her To Eternity ". "Albert Goes West" goes all Jesus And Mary Chain and features man who "Had a psychotic episode on dude ranch that involved a bottle of ammonia " . The "sha la-lal la,s" at the end are great. "We Call Upon The Author" is an audacious rant against god interweaving in between funked bass, viola, poking guitars /keyboards and where Cave " feels like a vacuum cleaner!!! A complete sucker". "Hold Onto Yourself" is a more hushed affair with horror movie atmospherics and plangent organ.. "Lie Down Here (& Be My Girl)" is an exhortation to some femme fatale whose leery guitar matches Caves intentions in a tale where "We've been scribbled in the margins of a story that is patently absurd".
"Jesus Of The Moon" is a lithe undulating ballad with viola and Warren Ellis's distinctive flute. More news From Nowhere" is nigh on eight minutes of bleakly comic observations where "Here comes Alina with two black eyes/ she's given her self a transfusion / she's filled herself with panda blood to avoid all the confusion ". A repetitive guitar hook and more funk edged bass propel Cave along his way.
Dig Lazarus Dig will never be my favourite Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds album. I prefer the eclectic "Henrys Dream " , the awesome "Boatmans Call " confessional or the classy lugubrious strings of "The Good Son" but this is still another terrific album. Those who prefer the wracked hollow eyed blues of his first album - before he went all cabaret (as they see it) may actually find this a return to form. I can think of very few artists around today who continue to hold my interest 14 albums in (Brian Eno , The Blue Nile , Scott Walker -though the last two are so slow to produce material I fear they will never reach fourteen -)but this band do . And they never ever disappoint .
|
|
|
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic!!! Nick Cave!!! Album!!! (8/10), 5 April 2008
Nick Cave's fourteenth album finds him trading in the gothic romanticism of his previous work for a swampy, sleazy garage-rock-influenced sound. Taking some of its cues from Cave's recent 'Grinderman' side project and some of the wild border country atmospherics of his soundtrack work with Bad Seed Warren Ellis, Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! is markedly more upbeat but no more compromising for that. Murky and apocalyptic, the album features extended semi-spoken rants from Cave over spooked, often complex arrangements of angular guitars, organs, rattly percussion and ominous basslines.
There's something of Tom Waits or even Tricky about some of the ambience and arrangements, the Bad Seeds pulling out all the stops to create cinematic landscapes to Cave's own tales of brawlers, bawlers and bastards (to quote Waits). Cave is a singular talent seemingly liberated by some of his recent tangents, but the Seeds almost steal the show here, each track a little movie reel in itself. Those looking for the classic Cave ballad might be put off by Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!'s rawness of mood and mildly pornographic lyrics, but no-one can complain with songs as strong as 'Jesus Of The Moon' or 'Midnight Man'. It's not supposed to be like this, rock stars (or whatever you call someone like Nick Cave) aren't meant to hit career highs in their fifties, making some of their most innovative and evocative music fourteen albums in.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
~ Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
~ Elbow
~ Portishead
~ Fleet Foxes
~ Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
