Some Grinderman came on at a recent party, and I realized despite liking Nick Cave perfectly good, I had never heard anything from this project. Seemed agreeable enough at the time.
This starts off ridiculously promisingly, with a night-black fuzzed guitar sound and an unpredictable, twitchy structure. The former sticks around for the duration of the album, and remains welcome, but the structures get much more linear and much less unpredictable, and overall the pacing drags pretty badly. In most of the songs, Cave gets a vocal line in mind and meditates on it with a simmering menace for five minutes or so, sounding somewhere between a listenable Tom Waits and a sedated The Fall. Kitchenette displays this problem most prominently, plodding on laboriously, seemingly without any particular plan in mind, as the lines mutate slowly over muttering and crooning, smoldering without catching fire.
I love the guitar sound, and the solos do occasionally ignite, but the whole tone is just too stoned, too unstructured, too undisciplined to interest me too much on an album level 3/5
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment