GRINDERMAN - Grinderman Review

"I've got to get up to get down and start all over again," claims Nick Cave at the start of "Get It On", the opening track of this debut album by his new band Grinderman. And, although the band isn't strictly new in that it comprises three members of The Bad Seeds (violinist Warren Ellis, bassist Martyn Casey and drummer Jim Sclavunos), you get the general idea, as the hyper-distorted guitar loop, percussion and lone piano chord that accompany Cave's ranted "words of wisdom" make for a more dramatic opening salvo than he's wielded in some time....full text Round up the usual suspects. Who have we got here? Ellis, fiddle and guitars, no fixed abode; Sclavunos, drums, don't look in his basement, he's done something terrible in there; Casey, bass, has the look of a potentially violent used car salesman; Cave, vocals, guitar, keys, beginning to resemble a horses skull with bits of black fuzzy felt stuck to it. Woah, there, rewind a little bit. Nick Cave... on guitar?...full text Grinderman is a new band, comprised of four members of a band that's not at all new. Neither are its members, the head honcho of whom is now 50 years wiser. Nick Cave, Meltdown curator and murder ballad maker, has taken the opportunity, with Warren Ellis, Martyn Casey and Jim Sclavunos, to foist upon us a testosterone-fuelled, musical mid-life crisis steeped in alcohol and frustration. And he's picked up a guitar....full text