Grinderman
At Phoenix Concert Theatre in Toronto on Thursday
You can’t escape your own shadow, but you can make it run. Nick Cave was nearing 50 and had led the Bad Seeds for almost a quarter-century when his shadow informed him that his formerly dangerous rock band had become a revered and somewhat predictable institution.
Cave’s flight response led him to a surprisingly unfamiliar place: his guitar, not much used by him when, four years ago, he began writing songs on it and performing them with a three-man subset of the Bad Seeds. Those songs, heavier and more elemental than the ones he customarily wrote at the piano, became the bluesy, blood-stained repertoire of Grinderman, the incendiary garage band that roared into the Phoenix on Thursday, two months after the release of its second album.
Grinderman (which includes guitarist and free-range instrumentalist Warren Ellis, bassist Martyn Casey and drummer Jim Sclavunos) is a real maximalist kind of rock band. It seemed most itself, most true to its goals as an engine of uproar, when it blew up a great squalling mass of aggressive, hard-edged sound. Cave would scream into the microphone, staring into space as if at an image of God roasting on a stick, his band mates would tear at their instruments as if to make them break, and all of us packed into the club seemed to fly in one short leap into the heart of rock ’n’ roll.
This thrilling din had been carefully prepared. Grinderman’s penetrating grainy guitar sound explodes on the ear like no one else’s, which is enough to tell you that it took some searching to achieve. Ellis’s slurry, skronky solo playing sounded wildly inebriated, but sober minds had decided it was the way to go. Even his frequent breaks from his main instrument, for a sawing turn on violin or some violent assaults with shakers on a hi-hat, were shrewd studies in going against the grain and over the top.
Cave’s thematic concerns haven’t budged an inch with Grinderman. He’s still obsessed with achieving some kind of transcendence, whether through God, sex, degradation or all three at once. His default mode is a totally uninhibited statement of the power of his need, or the power of the one uniquely capable of satisfying it. We got the first in No Pussy Blues, a cathartic cry of frustration that made the Stones’s Satisfaction sound like a song for angry three-year-olds. We got the second in Worm Tamer and Heathen Child, two lurid portraits of she who must be obeyed.
On record, these songs can seem almost comic in their balls-out extremity. On the stage, they seemed exactly the right scale for Cave’s scene-chewing persona. He harangued his lyrics as much as he sang them, sometimes mimicking the energy of the TV evangelists whose verbal parallelism shows up so often in his lyrics. “You think your little wife will protect you; you are wrong! You think your children will protect you; you are wrong!” he chanted, pointing each time with his whole arm at someone, anyone, in front of the stage. He dealt out the damnation and lived it at the same time, as if trying to fuse Jerry Lee Lewis and his preacher cousin Jimmy Swaggart into one.
Not bad for a guy wading deep into middle age. Cave isn’t going gentle into that unsettling phase of life. Not for him the special aged-rocker hell of crooning and winking through the Great American Songbook, or making misty videos for Susan Boyle.
Grinderman played Montreal’s Metropolis Theatre on Friday night, and reaches the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver for a sold-out show on Nov. 26.
