So, it’s hardly “hold the front page, Rupert!”, earthquakingly astounding news (though recent Richter-scale bothering tremors in the UK have to be assigned to something we suppose), but Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds have made another truly great album. Remarkable, even. That has become such a given after 14 albums that it feels like it’s barely worth mentioning anymore. But there’s always something to exclaim about, that too is a guarantee, and ‘Dig!!!! Lazarus, Dig!!!’ has plenty of opportunity for that. It seems even more remarkable considering the flurry of activity he and select Seeds have engaged in over the last couple of years – namely the lauded molar-rattling Grinderman project and Nick Cave & Warren Ellis’ lush soundtrack work. But rather than being a leech on their creativity it’s fair to say that it’s stoked embers into a blaze.
This is no instance of laurel resting. This is a Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds record in the very pit of its gut, rather than simply being a product worthy of their tremendous pool of capability. It has pangs that are difficult to explain away, that couldn’t merely be composed or scored. And without wishing to belittle latter-day Cave recordings, their fluidity is surpassed here by something much twitchier, more cathartic and ultimately redemptive.
Right from the off, with the malfunctioning Hammond clockwork grind of the title track, shot through with Cave’s deliriously eloquent street preacher narration, there is a sense of the rabble chorus that made albums like ‘Let Love In’ and ‘Tender Prey’ so forcefully engaging, the Bad Seeds banding as feisty mob to ram their helmsman’s point home. This is also especially apparent on ‘Albert Goes West’s creased blanket of droning feedback and the more meditative, late-night blues creeping of album closer ‘More News From Nowhere’. Not all the songs on the record are hell for leather, bent on coarse aural excesses, in fact very few are even if they eventually leave that impression. The deftness of their touch is unparalleled and the mastery of their craft so distinguished that they make every single strike count.
And what of Cave himself? “Now, myxamatoid kids straddle the streets, we’ve shunned them from the greasy grind, the poor little things they look so sad and old as they mount us from behind, I ask them to desist and refrain.” (‘We Call Upon The Author To Explain’). “She rubs the lamp between her thighs, and hopes the genie comes out singing” (‘Hold On To Yourself’). “Mr Sandman, the inseminator, opens her up like a love letter and enters her dreams” (‘Today’s Lesson’). His burgeoning hyper-literary excellence offers service as usual, then. Only on a Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds record could you get a theological essay pondering the existence of God, supplanting Lazarus from the New Testament and into 70’s New York – and dance to it – or hear revered poet and author Charles Bukowski dismissed as “a jerk”. And although his blood boils more consistently on ‘Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!!’ than it has for many a moon, he also finds time on ‘Jesus Of The Moon’ to construct his most sumptuous and deeply affecting 3 minutes of beauty – trance inducing and only moderately paranoid jazz sashaying – in years.
They’ve been a paradox for a while, that’s particularly true of the version that recorded ‘Dig!! Lazarus, Dig!!!’. They’re not surprising, but only because they always have been and continue to be in the details – familiarity is unable to breed contempt amid such creativity. We’ll meet again in a couple of years, then, for further corroboration, if you need it.