Two Music Reviews

I've had two highly anticipated albums become available for musical consumption in the past few weeks (neither album is out yet, but both have been made available via streaming through their Myspace pages), so let's go over them, shall we?

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!!



Once I truly discovered Nick Cave, I fell in love very quickly. My first foray into the man's work was the 1996 album Murder Ballads. It's a crazy album, with a lot of rich and literary imagery. Other albums I discovered (your Henry's Dream, your Tender Prey, your Let Love In) were all great listens. Then in 2004, Nick released the double album Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus. Now, this was true, transcendent art, and one of my favorite albums of all time. Everything clicked. Soaring musical passages, wonderful singing and lyrics from Cave, and a huge variety of styles. Nick then took a choice few of his Bad Seeds (including violinist and co-composer of The Proposition and The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford Warren Ellis, and no, it's not that Warren Ellis) and made the side project Grinderman, designed to be a more rock intensive album. With the ushering in of 2008, we get Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!!, and to be honest, it just doesn't shape up.

Now, this isn't as much of a misstep as Nocturama was, but I can't shake the feeling that this is more of a Grinderman album than a Bad Seeds album. Sure, Nick's at the front of both, and he still wrote all the lyrics, and maybe I've gotten so used to and obsessed with AB/TLOO (wow, that's a really clunky acronym) that my standards were simply too high and lofty. Here's a perfect example of the kind of fundamental difference between the two most recent Bad Seeds albums. On Abattoir, Cave is backed by his band, as well as a full choir. On Lazarus, whatever parts would potentially be sung by the choir is instead replaced by the rest of the Seeds singing backup. Now, this isn't inherently a bad thing. Those parts don't sound bad at all. But when you look at the difference between "Get Ready for Love" from Abattoir and "Lie Down Here (And Be My Girl)" from Lazarus, you can't help but notice the difference in scope. There isn't a single moment like the grand crescendo at the end of "Hiding All Away" or the bridge of "Papa Won't Leave You, Henry" or the entirety of any live rendition of "Tupelo" that strips away the outside world and envelops you in a chaotic tidal wave of sound.

And that's the odd thing about this album. Nothing about it is bad. All the songs are interesting and well constructed, but I still found myself being somewhat bored listening to it. It's a more intimate, stripped down and primal album, but it somehow lacks the immediacy of Cave's other work. I'm not advocating that he just recreate the feel of Abattoir on every album he records from here on out, but one of the things I've always loved about Nick's albums was the variety from song to song. And with both Grinderman and Lazarus, that variety is stripped back for more straightforward song crafting. Sure, it's better than most of the stuff you'll find out there that masquerades as music, and it's a great way for someone without knowledge of Nick Cave to acclimate himself to the type of music the Bad Seeds play. But for those seasoned veterans like myself, it just keeps coming up short. Every great Nick Cave album has had that one (or multiple) moment where everything just kicks into another gear and chills run down your spine. I couldn't find a single moment like that on Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!!.

The album will be out in the States on April 8th. The Myspace page currently has six songs available to listen, which gives a good cross section for what to expect.

Firewater - The Golden Hour




Here we have another band that hasn't put out any original music since 2004 (they released a cover album in 2005, entitled Songs We Should Have Written). I've already expressed my love for Firewater in a previous post on this here blog, and I was very anxious to see just what we would be getting from their next output. Tod A. took a abbatical from the United States after he finished his Firewater touring schedule in 2004 due to being disgruntled by the reelection of President Bush. What followed was a three year journey across the Middle East, India and Southeast Asia. While on the road, he often got together with local musicians to play and record music. Nearly all of that music became the foundation for The Golden Hour. And what we've gotten is a very distinct musical piece that fits in perfectly with everything Firewater has released in the past.

Indeed, in many ways this is the quintessential Firewater album. It takes the eastern European and Middle Eastern musical influences of Get Off the Cross...We Need the Wood for the Fire and melds it with the groove intensive, upbeat and catchy as hell hooks of The Ponzi Scheme to create what just might be the best Firewater album to date. It doesn't waste time, opening with the politically charged escapist fantasy "Borneo." The music Tod recorded while out of the country is very apparent here and in the two tracks that follow, "This is My Life" and "Some Kind of Kindness." The mood of the album follows a sort of cosine curve, starting wild and boisterous in the early tracks, and mellowing down during the middle of the album for some cooler and more introspective songs ("6:45" and "Paradise"), before ramping back up right around the best track of the album, "Electric City," kicks in. I can't heap enough praise on "Electric City." It has a couple of those great Tod A tricks of the phrase ("You don't have to be a soldier to fight/But you gotta have a killer in ya/You don't have to be a poet to die/It's the little things that kill ya"), a bouncy bongo/conga/tabla groove and a killer guitar riff to end the song. It's no wonder that most of the musicians Tod played with while abroad predominantly play music designed for belly dancers. You can just feel it.

While The Golden Hour may not have some of the extreme highs from other Firewater albums (nothing quite approaches the greatness of "Refinery," "The Circus," "Dropping Like Flies," "Dark Days Indeed," or "7th Avenue Static"), this is very easily their most consistently great album. There isn't a dull moment throughout the thirteen tracks, and it's very tough to listen to such undeniably fun music and not have a huge smile pasted across your face. It really is a testament to Firewater's power as a band to have such an upbeat album come out of Tod's complete and total emotional upheaval. The album is set for release in April (no specific date as of yet) and every track is available on their Myspace page. Check it out, and be sure you try to see them on tour in May. I've just bought tickets to the May 23rd show in Boston to go along with my Philly tickets two days later. The idea of seeing them twice in such a short time just makes me happy. And isn't that what music is all about at the end of the day?