Grinderman 2

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. What followed was a revelation, an instinctual yawp that resurrected the demons of each musician's past: the trashcan proselytizing 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. A new generation fell in love with Grinderman, and of course, longtime Nick Cave fans came along willingly for the ride. Even Snoop Dogg namechecked Grinderman on Conan as one of his favorite new albums.

The first thing that hits you about Grinderman 2 is that you've never heard anything like it. The debut album did its job. It defined the band. It marked a clear contrast with Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. Nick, Warren, Martyn and Jim forged a distinctly different way of working together. They cast off musical baggage, shrugged off accepted wisdom, and tested pre-conceptions about who they were as musicians. In the process, they took to the Bad Seeds hallowed legacy with a baseball bat. Their new album, Grinderman 2, combines the structured invention of their live performance and the unrestrained free-for-all of their studio improvisation. But these guys also know something about the art of writing songs. Grinderman 2 bears the hallmark of its rapturously received predecessor, yet is more open-ended in its structure, more far reaching in its scope, and gloriously lost in its own transports of noise and rhythm. Grinderman is no hobby, no dalliance, and clearly no one-off: it is a crucible, an experimental workshop, a disciplined orgy of ideas and action. Grinderman is the one-of a-kind band Nick, Warren, Martyn and Jim have waited all their life to be. Comes with a twenty-eight page booklet.