Nick Cave’s Grinderman

“Nick Cave is an Australian by blood, an honorary American by dint of his devotion to pulp, and, at fifty-two, the standard-bearer for a global assembly of bookish, noisy, morbid year-round Halloweeners. His most recent band, Grinderman, which shares members with his longest-running group, the Bad Seeds, has just released a second record strong enough to make “side project” seem like an inaccurate description. In the eighties, it looked as though Cave might become a darker, underground version of Elvis, but that time has passed, partly because his interests have changed. Now his profile is pleasantly complicated; in the past thirty years he has channelled a dozen different versions of the male psyche.”