Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds: Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!

The Bad Seeds' last album, 2004's Abattoir

Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus, was a sumptuous, literate double disc, but the band's

Grinderman alter ego, launched last year, seems to have permanently stripped

Nick Cave's hard-won polish. Much of Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!—particularly the

choppy, squealing title track and the lopsidedly sinuous "Night Of The Lotus

Eaters"—is an unhinged, even reckless mess with chunks of dirt and blood

under its fingernails. On "Today's Lesson" and "Lie Down Here (And Be My

Girl)," trumpet-like guitars recall David Bowie's herky-jerky production on The

Stooges' Raw Power;

on "Albert Goes West," an impenetrable wall of distortion dissolves into an

equally dense cloud of toxins.

Lyrically, Cave's dick is still hanging out of his

pants: His lascivious self-caricature from Grinderman resurfaces in Dig's closer, "More News From

Nowhere," a "Sister Ray"-like odyssey into hallucinatory sex, boasting lines

like "I called her my Nubian princess, gave her some sweetback, badass jive / I

spent the next seven years between her legs, pining for my wife." Even more

palpable is the absence of piano—Cave seems to have all but abandoned the

instrument, erasing much of the friction between muck and majesty that fueled

The Bad Seeds of yore. Yes, Dig bears little concept or nuance, but it more than

makes up for it in raw, oozing passion. And the aging Cave, to his credit, can

still easily eat his own weight in sleaze.