Grinderman - Get It On

In Nick Cave's drive to musical emancipation, The Bad Seeds provide direction without ever taking hold of the wheel. Imperative to the composition of seminal masterpieces like The Boatman's Call and The Good Son, this unruly collective of musicians are content to take a back seat whilst their celebrated leader rides up front. But in the creation of Grinderman the unequal distribution of praise has been redressed - The Bad Seeds finally have their foot on the accelerator.

Comprising of Warren Ellis, Martin Casey, Jim Sclavunos and, of course, Nick Cave, Grinderman is the creative outlet for four precociously talented individuals. Embracing a new-found group prerogative missing in The Bad Seeds, their eponymous debut LP sees Cave's vocal recede from the foreground into a swamp of gospel-blues-punk. When The Skinny catches up with drummer Jim, we uncover just how democratic Grinderman really is.

"I guess you could say the album is a collaborative thing," says the towering New Yorker unconvincingly. "There hasn't really been a power shift,“ Nick is still Nick and we look to him as a guiding light. But, on the other hand, we all have an input in the music and there's a lot of latitude for us to try to do things and run ideas past the rest of members. So, I wouldn't say the dynamics of the group have changed, but the inter-working of it has become more refined."

Recorded in five days, Grinderman juxtaposes The Bad Seeds' atmospherics with The Birthday Party's crunching no-wave to startling and often disturbing effect. "We're a band that can play with dynamics, atmosphere and mood and you can hear that on the record," Jim claims brashly. "There are songs that are more mysterious sounding like Man on the Moon or When My Love Comes Down but others like Love Bomb are completely in your face. Without sounding unduly verbose we can cover a range of styles - it's a diverse album."

This dexterity combined with Cave's lyrical intensity makes Grinderman more outwardly confrontational than any pseudo-political album currently saturating the airwaves. But rather than a direct reaction to global politics, Jim feels the record alludes itself to the re-appropriation of gender in society. "I don't think it addresses any particular topic of our time - it's not a political statement," he says eloquently. "The core point of view, if I may speak for Nick and his lyrics, is that it concerns itself with being male in a world where one is powerless to influence things around oneself, and the disconnectedness that results from it. A sort of social impotence, if you like."

Such a narrative risks romanticising the demise of patriarchy but Jim believes the album's structure contextualises the issue rather than glorifying it. "Songs like Go Tell The Women might suggest a broader range of things but they're treated in a lightly ironic way," he says openly. "We sequenced the album to make an old time record - “ to be organised and carry you on a little journey. The songs kind of resonate off each other and inform each other with recurring motifs."

So is Grinderman a long term project? "Yeah, for us it's a good way of sneaking in twice as much output," he half-jokes. "Once we've got the next Bad Seeds album recorded we'll be a bit more at leisure to work out the live Grinderman experience. Anyway, this way we can trick the public into being receptive to more music from us!" It looks like Nick Cave might have to wait a little longer before he gets to grips with that old steering wheel again.