Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! (2008)

Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! (2008)

Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! benefits from all the lubed-up rock looseness of Grinderman, but repurposes that energy back into the context of the full Bad Seeds complement. The album demonstrates Cave’s lyrical skill yet again, as he mixes the mythic with the profane and daily banality with the larger-than-life. Perhaps nothing is clearer proof of the tireless rush of his sharp pen as the lyrical tour-de-force of the title track, which imagines a Lazarus raised from the dead into the modern world and abandoned to the vagaries of fame and obsession. “We Call Upon The Author To Explain” takes a similarly, shall we say, liberal interpretation of religious imagery, positing the author of creation as an absent figure, either unwilling or incapable of explaining the reason for things as they are.

Musically, the Bad Seeds cover a careening range of styles, from the creepy noir-reggae of “Moonland” to the fuzzed-out garage noise of “Albert Goes West” to the paranoid, Lyre Of Orpheus-like balladeering of “Hold On To Yourself,” where Warren Ellis’s understated string loops almost call to mind Mick Harvey’s calamitous bass loops on Tender Prey’s “The Mercy Seat.” The album as a whole is far less abrasive and needled with noisy outbursts as Grinderman’s debut, but much of the spontaneity and ragged energy remains in full view. One of the album’s most singular moments is “Night Of The Lotus Eaters,” which embraces rigid repetition through loops and Harvey’s descending bass swing in such a way that it almost feels like the Bad Seeds have somehow steered their way onto Kraftwerk’s Autobahn.

Perhaps the most beneficent thing of all with Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! is the extent to which it simply sounds like a bunch of friends having a great time. That’s not to imply that the subject matter is all particularly cheery, but it feels like the Bad Seeds have internalized some of the grandiosity of the Abbatoir Blues material, but figured out how to explore it with their more traditional instrumental choices. And as closing songs go, “More News From Nowhere” is a nearly perfect comedown (and also happens to read like a natural precursor to “Higgs Boson Blues,” from the most recent Bad Seeds album, Push The Sky Away). Lyrically, it’s another bit of Odyssey-referencing fun (as on “Night Of The Lotus Eaters”), as Cave sings “Strap me to the mast!” and describes a “Nubian princess” in ways that are very suggestive of Circe. But musically, the song is a gently meditative jam session, everyone swaying and shimmying in unison, while Mick Harvey softly jangles away on his electric guitar, effectively playing himself off-stage for the final time, because he would leave the Bad Seeds in early 2009.