DIGGING LAZARUS (BUT ONLY A BIT)

As a novelist/poet, former post-punk enfant terrible, and ultimately, piano-based troubadour, Nick Cave constantly juggles three sets of sensibilities at once when making music. The degree to which he hits the mark each time depends on how successfully he balances them all. His finest moments (Tender Prey, Henry's Dream, Murder Ballads) incorporate rich, deliciously knotty, Dickens-in-the-gutter prose, visceral bursts of electric mayhem, and the melodic knack of a songwriter who has absorbed everything from Burt Bacharach to Lee Hazlewood. It's a tough trick to pull off, which explains why, despite many moments of brilliance, his output has been inconsistent over the last decade or so.

Cave achieves that elusive balance roughly 30% of the time on his latest opus, Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! When he made it, he was coming off one of his least substantive releases: his Grinderman side project with a few of his Bad Seeds buddies. All brawn and no brains, it reeked of a mid-life crisis case trying to prove he could still rock by making up juvenile lyrics on the spot to accompany sub-MC5 garage-rock vamps. Unfortunately, Cave brings too much of that “hey kids, let's kick out the jams” approach to bear on Lazarus. With the head Seed delivering what often at least sound like off-the-cuff, vaguely poetic lyrical shards atop the most basic and repetitive of riffs, many of the tunes come off like bad Doors outtakes (admittedly, some of of his best tunes have sounded like good Doors outtakes).

You can never count the old coffin-dodger out completely, though, and when he connects he makes a major impact. The title track's modernized biblical tale, the self-mocking literary diatribe “We Call Upon The Author,” and the eight-minute Velvet Underground-esque closer, “More News From Nowhere,” provide some of the only moments where it seems Cave took longer than the time between two Gitanes on mid-session cigarette break to write the lyrics, and he delivers them with urgent ferocity, letting the cumulative effect of his wordy flights of fancy piledrive their way into the listener's brain. Those luminescent spots on an otherwise lackluster album are effective reminders that Cave's muse may go into brief periods of hiding (as it seems to have done on too many of these songs) but it never completely disappears.