When you spend your entire career exposing the dark side of the human psyche and don’t pay for it with your life, something’s got to give. You either have to lighten up to give some contrast or continue on and risk the very real possibility of being viewed as a mawkish, two-dimensional sham. People will usually cut it short and just call you a joke. Last year found Nick Cave cutting loose from his Bad Seeds to jam out some gravel-voiced and foul-mouthed poetry in the moody but groovy all-star group Grinderman and, in so doing, exposed that while still bordering on psychosis, not everything needed to be as dour as Boatman’s Call to build a fantastic album. With that lesson learned, Cave returned to The Bad Seeds to show them a few new tricks and the results are something completely different on Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!! The new record is a complete sonic left turn for The Bad Seeds as, from the opening title track, Cave convinces The Bad Seeds to abandon their mood building and gothic leanings and splay into as many directions as there are tracks on the album.
While Cave himself holds down the common thread that binds this album to The Bad Seeds’ prior work with that signature baritone, the band itself explores and absorbs the sounds of a host of other acts like some monstrous and squalid amoeba. The title track tries on Doors theatrics before shifting completely to Lou Reed’s moody romanticism (“Today’s Lesson”), “Moonland" stabs at Lee Perry-ish dub reggae, which basically illustrated that there is no rhyme or reason to where the band will go next, but that’s part of the fun of the record. From track one The Bad Seeds flex their chameleonic muscles and gleefully deface as many sounds as they feel like. They even take a crack at U-fucking-2 in “We Call upon the Author.” Cave mutates Bono’s typically uplifting lyrical fare into a theological question and you can almost hear the band laughing as they ape Larry Mullen and Adam Clayton’s rhythmic interplay—if that doesn’t spell a good time, I don’t know what does.
None of these tracks plays it genuinely though and that fact is the greatest feature of this album. Cave has always hinted that even when he wasn’t being flat-out miserable the singer at his happiest was a sardonic lyrical sneer and this time out the band is on-board for the sentiment. Each track on Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!! is the finest form of dry wit and satire in that it plays only straight enough to be recognizable for what sound the band is aiming for, but after that, Cave turns the critical hounds off the leash and lets them rend each song limb from limb. It’s impossible to hide a sadistic smirk listening to Cave and The Bad Seeds chop up every sound they come into contact with and feed it to their audience Sweeney Todd style, but hopefully they’ll put a few morsels on ice and reheat the leftovers on records to come.
Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!! is out now on Anti.
More on Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds here: nickcaveandthebadseeds.com
