CD reviews

Grinderman, Jack Ingram

Grinderman rips through aging-punk blues

Monday, April 02, 2007

Grinderman

'Grinderman'

(Anti-)

As he has for the past 20 years, Nick Cave could have spent the foreseeable future making his patented brand of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds albums: some slicked-up Goth, black suit and shoes, a bit of gospel and the blues.

Instead, he grabbed a couple of his veteran pals — multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis, drummer Jim Sclavunos and bassist Martyn Casey — and started an old-fashioned punk rock band called Grinderman.

He also decided to play guitar — an instrument he's never recorded with before — so simple songs were hammered out of jams. This could have been an embarrassing disaster, the sound of aging punks trying to reclaim old glories.

But the opposite happened. As the music dumbed down, the inspiration went up and this slab of gritty thud is one of the year's gnarliest, funniest albums, a perfect midway point between the Bad Seed's polished, melodramatic torch-rock and the primal howl generated by Cave's first band, the almighty Birthday Party.

It's also a great midlife crisis album, which leads Cave down some roads that are revealing, touching and self-parodic; despite his self-serious persona, Cave's sense of humor has always been underrated and these tunes manage to be both funny and deeply personal, not an easy combination to nail down.

"Get It On" sets up the strutting stud to fuzzy bass and rolling toms, while "No (Expletive) Blues" shows him incapable of closing the deal between blasts of feedback ("I read her Eliot, read her Yeats/I tried my best to stay up late/ I fixed the hinges on her gate/ But still she just never wanted to").

Between scorchers with titles such as "Love Bomb," "Honey Bee (Lets Fly To Mars)" and the hyper-ironic (one hopes) misogyny of "Go Tell the Women," there's even room for subtlety. The sad "Man in the Moon" reminds us that papa was a rolling stone, and "When My Love Comes Down" invites you into the vortex. Raw and moving, rude and roaring, Grinderman is that rarest of rock bands — noisy, thrilling and smartly adult. —Joe Gross

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Jack Ingram

'This Is It'

(Big Machine)

There are two Top 10 hits on Jack Ingram's new album, his first all-studio effort in six years. Don't mean that two of the new songs sound like potential hits; they actually charted last year, with track 4, "Wherever You Are" reaching No. 1. That slick pop country ditty and "Love Me" were the Austinite's re-calling card to Nashville, tacked onto a live album that, itself, was a reissue. "This Is It" is the album Ingram would've made right about now if he didn't have to start over.

Ingram would like the title's meaning to go further than that, that it would signal the culmination of his life's work. But after opening strongly with the Radney Foster co-penned "Measure Of a Man," there are too many lush, midtempo rockers (and a cover of Hinder's "Lips Of An Angel" that sounds too creepy for country radio) to wade through before Ingram finally reaches shore with "Great Divide," a Texas song that could be about anywhere, and "Don't Want To Hurt," where the melody finally takes over.

A lot has happened in Ingram's life since the 2001 release of his previous studio album "Electric" and he's sometimes sentimental ("Ava Adele," a love song to his first daughter) about the changes, but also sometimes sarcastic ("Easy As 1, 2, 3"). But more often than not, "This Is It" is too soaked in sincerity ("All I Can Do," "Make a Wish") to get way up there where he wants to be as a writer.

Sturdy and tuneful and touching, this is a satisfying album, but to call it Ingram's best you have to add two words: so far.

— Michael Corcoran