Sunday, March 9, 2008

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.

Thursday, March 6, 2008

IT'S GOOD TO BE THE KING



2008 is shaping up as a fine (and strange) time to be Leonard Cohen. Most obviously, he's about to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. We'll be taking bets as to whether or not the notorious roue makes a pass at fellow inductee Madonna before the night is over (Hey, he used to date the 25-years-his-junior Rebecca DeMornay...). He also wound up, at least tangentially, in the winner's circle at the Grammys this year, as one of the vocalists on Herbie Hancock's Album of the Year-winning Joni Mitchell tribute River: The Joni Letters, and that's the first time in his 40-plus-year recording career he's come within spitting distance of that particular distinction. Hell, he's even getting major props on American Idol! Contestant Jason Castro snared enough ears with his version of (Jeff Buckley's version of) the Cohen classic "Hallelujah" that the instantly-made-available download of the performance shot to the top of the iTunes charts the next day. Amid all this attention, the 73-year-old songpoet himself is getting set to embark on his first tour in eons this spring, and is said to have a new album in the can for release later this year.

As if all this wasn't enough--what's the proof that we went to the wrong night of Jonathan Richman's two-night stint at the Music Hall of Williamsburg this week? How about the fact that we missed Richman's version of "Here It Is," from Cohen's 2001 album 10 New Songs? Damn the cruel fates that kept us from hearing everyone's favorite man-child, author of "Abominable Snowman in the Market" and "Chewing Gum Wrapper," merrily crooning "here is your cart, your cardboard and piss," and "here is your sickness, your bed and your pan" from the ol' Gloomy Gus's songbook. Not only that, it turns out the tune will be on Richman's new album, out on Vapor Records next month. With such an unusual amount of attention on Cohen's plate lately, can a Hannah Montana guest shot be far behind? As previously noted, he does have a way with younger women...