Grinderman

Grinderman | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (April 10, 2007)
• Original Release Date: 2007
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: ANTI-
• ASIN: B000MX7YUE
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Vinyl  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #45,231 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

From Amazon.co.uk

Grinderman is the sound of indie rock legends growing old disgracefully, and that is by no means a criticism. From the opening rant of "Get It On," this is an album with all the menace of an angry drunk, dripping with anger and testosterone (as the surfeit of facial hair in the band's interior photo will attest). It could even be the sound of Nick Cave's midlife crisis, but it doesn't matter, because Grinderman rocks. It's the sound of four musicians having a grand time, turning the volume up to 11 and really cutting loose. For that reason, it's the more upbeat tracks here that are probably the best: "Honey Bee (Let's Fly to Mars)" with its driving electric organ, the primal urgency of "Depth Charge Ethel," and the strutting album closer "Love Bomb." After all the po-faced seriousness he's displayed in recent years, it's good to know that Cave has rediscovered his sense of humour: "I cleaned the sheets on my bed, I combed the hairs across my head, I sucked in my gut and still she said, 'I don't want to,'" he sings on "No Pussy Blues," with his tongue firmly in cheek (amongst other places). Simply put, Grinderman is a hoot. --Ted Kord

Product Description

The story of Grinderman begins within the working processes of another band: Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds. At the start of 2004, when Nick Cave took a small team of Bad Seeds members -- violinist Warren Ellis, bassist Martyn Casey and drummer Jim Sclavunos -- off to the tiny Misère studio in Paris for a songwriting session, they effectively established a new band. The small combo configuration of Nick, Warren, Marty and Jim had its public debut in a showcase performance to promote the Bad Seeds Nocturama album; the foursome continued working in this streamlined format, getting together frequently for Nick Cave "solo" tours. Born of babbling lyrics hatched from Bosch eggshells in the Hyde-bound apocalyptic margins of the Cave brain, the Grinderman sound is an instinctual yawlp that also resurrects the demons of each musician's past: the trashcan proselytising of Birthday Party -era Nick; Sclavunos' late 70s New York no-wave noise wisdom; Martyn Casey's ominous Triffids bass reverb; plus Ellis' avant-garde soundtrack work and his teenage love of Black Sabbath. Destination: Out! Grinderman sound different from everyone, including themselves. As Memphis Slim put it back in 1941, "While everything is quiet and easy/ Mr. Grinder can have his way." It's a new day. God help you all.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't buy the import, March 20, 2007

By 

D. Buckley "consumer 99" (Cleveland, OH United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Grinderman (Audio CD)

This import contains no extras for the additional cost, but DO BUY THE ALBUM!
Do you remember when Jesus and Mary Chain released their first album? When NIN released Downward Spiral? When you first heard From Her to Eternity?
This album is better than that.
Being a Nick Cave fan for years, I'm totally in shock and awe over how GREAT this album is. Sometimes musically reminiscent of Velvet Underground and original Stooges, with post industrial noise, and Nick Cave's dramatic poetic vocals, Grinderman creates a sound here that is intensely original and just mercilessly rocks.
Grinderman is the best album I'm going to hear this year.
It's just incredible that after all these years; Nick Cave had this album in him. It just rocks. If you can listen to Love Bomb without getting goose bumps, you're just not human.
If I have one criticism it's that I miss Blixa.
I never thought I'd hear music as cool as this created in 2007.
Play it loud.

35 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Liberate your invisibility, April 14, 2007

By 

Morgan D. Wolf "Morganwolf" (Connecticut, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Grinderman (Audio CD)

It's fascinating to hear a band address themes of aging and sexual longing in a youth-obsessed culture, in terms of the withering knowledge that sexual desire does not decrease as one reaches mid-life and beyond. The ability to fulfill that desire, at will, is another thing entirely.

The resulting, bewildered frustration is brilliantly captured in the Grinderman sound: it's the noise of longing, of sorrow, of powerlessness, of an animal shrieking for release from a cage with no gate. It's also about finding humor, passion, and self-effacing acceptance of all that life has to offer - of refusing to be crushed under the gravity of encroaching age and jaded experience. That would be too predictable.

To put this all in context --

In a recent interview with Salon.com (April 12, 2007), Nick Cave said that, as one gets older, one becomes more invisible, and therefore, more powerless, to impact the world. On some level, he was observing that the inevitability of social and physical death are demons we must confront as we turn the corner on our 40s and smack into the hard brick wall of 50. On the other side of that wall is liberation, i.e., the freedom to re-invent onself and to remake the rules of the game. To please oneself.

That's the lesson to be learned from Nick Cave and the Grinderman songs.

Give this record a serious listen. Please don't try and compare it to The Birthday Party sound. This music is immediate and unique. It is Nick Cave, as he is, now. It is meant for all of us, still-rocking, still-lusting, still wildly alive, `invisibles' -- as we are, now.

26 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Special Packaging?, March 19, 2007

By 

B. Pardue "Todd Pardue" (Burlington, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Grinderman (Audio CD)

This product is listed as "Limited Edition Special Packaging" at a cost of $30.99. It's nothing but an ordinary CD in a plastic jewel case with a "Made In Hong Kong" sticker on the back. It's the import version. There's nothing "special" about the packaging. Save your money and get the domestic version for $14.

The album itself is awesome by the way. Nick Cave continues to make fantastic albums. Even though I feel ripped-off by Amazon's inaccurate advertising I must say this album is totally worth having. This is raw and noisy. It's removed from the introspective albums that Nick Cave has produced with the Bad Seeds recently but is better conceived than any Birthday Party record ever was. It's not The Bad Seeds. It's not The Birthday Party. It's GRINDERMAN!

To be fair, I asked Amazon to refund the price difference between this misleading product and the domestic version, the difference being about $17.. They agreed and I got my refund in no time. Thanks Amazon, great customer service.