How To: Begin a Rock Album

Grinderman is raw, razor-sharp, rock and roll. On their second studio album, Grinderman 2, Nick Cave’s stripped down quartet punishes their guitars with devilish zeal and thrashes drums and cymbals as if they have committed some atrocious offense, much like they did on their debut. The result is just over forty minutes of untamed, unfiltered, emotionally-charged music. In creating any album, the first tracks are always the most vital. They shape the path of the album, its atmosphere, in order to fashion a coherent vehicle of art these tracks must be its backbone. It has been a long time since I was gripped so by the start of an album the way I was when I first listened to Grinderman 2. A wolf, its teeth bared in a brutish snarl, adorns the cover, and the albums first two songs, “Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man” and “Worm Tamer” pull that strained snarl back further, unveiling a gritty sound.

“Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man” kicks off with an addictive bass loop and high-pitched, distorted screech of guitar. Cave’s voice rises above the grinding, grating guitars and churning percussion, with the roughness of a man who has seen it all: “I woke up this morning / I thought what am I doing here? / My brother he starts raging / Watch him rising / See him howling / And sucked her, and he sucked her, and he suck her dry / And he bit at me, and bit at me, and said goodbye / Up on the twenty-ninth floor.” The track barrels forward as Cave recounts the aftermath of a raucous night, his frank delivery in even play with a rapidity of percussion and crashing cymbals, only broken up by Cave’s own piercing yelp and the melting distortion of guitar.

There is hardly a moment to retrieve your breath or your senses as the music fades, and chuck-chuck-chuck of one garbled guitar exchanges twisted notes with another jagged axe in the lead up “Worm Tamer.” Backed by understated ascending harmonies and strewn with pating breaths that are barely human, Cave looses an aptly venomous string of words, charged with the most overt sexual allusions, each verses ending with the cutting phrase: “I guess that I’ve just loved you for too long.” In this second track amidst waves of buckling, distorted guitar strings, Cave loosens his grip over both his own insecurities (“She leaves me every night and who could blame her”) and his inability to detach himself from this nightmarish woman and find contentment elsewhere (“I cry a storm of tears till the rising dawn / You know I’m only happy when I’m inside her”). It is both a cyclical and finite piece, Cave could likely go on into the night about the deprave twists of this relationship, but track ends with Cave acknowledging the unmistakable: “I guess I’ve loved you for too long.”

Listen, this is how a rock album begins, unapologetic and feverish. And, after a complete listen it is undeniable that Nick Cave and Grinderman have no intentions of loosening the slack.