One of the many avenues that the multifaceted Abbatoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus seems to have opened up for Cave and his Bad Seeds is the fuzzed-out, garage rock hell-bomb of Grinderman. Of course, this isn’t exactly the Bad Seeds, even though the personnel are entirely drawn from that collective; instead, Cave, Warren Ellis, Martyn Casey, and Jim Sclavunos split off from the mothership to float in their own spittle-flecked universe for a while. And there was great rejoicing…

Musically, one of the most notable elements of Grinderman is that it sees Cave mostly stepping away from the piano and picking up an electric guitar. In an interview with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, Cave described the different bodily attitudes of the two instruments, whereby one almost pushes away on a piano to play it, whereas a guitar is slung around the body and hugged tightly. Given the lustiness of Grinderman, one imagines the back of Cave’s guitar must be rubbed and scuffed from all the thrusting that must have gone on. Compared to the pristine, lush arrangements that the Bad Seeds had been turning in for much of the decade prior to Grinderman, this project has a loose and improvisatory feeling, with Sclavunos’s busy, clattering percussion and Casey’s rubbery bass sketching out rough goalposts in between which Cave’s guitar and Ellis’s cupboardful of stringed instruments flit and flail and free themselves.

Cave’s lyrics and vocals are similarly unrestrained, dripping with libido and a wolf’s curled-lip grin. The album’s finest moment of lyrical abandon is “No Pussy Blues,” where an aging, paunched narrator attempts every trick he can think to persuade a young woman he sees in his audience to join him in certain carnal exploits. Cave’s guitar and Ellis’s electric bouzouki whip up a hellish racket as Cave wails “Damn! I got the no pussy blues!” and you grin and smirk and feel the keening spillover of unrequited lust. Though the album hits more spots than simple caveman sex-grunts, its most joyful moments are the ones that most fully embrace the blown-out excess of rock and roll amplification as raison d’être, such as “Depth Charge Ethel,” “Get It On,” and “Honey Bee (Let’s Fly To Mars),” on the latter of which Cave attacks his microphone with an explosive impression of a bee on the verge of cardiac arrest.

Even so, another of the album’s highlights is “Go Tell The Women,” which is a simple, quiet shuffle, punctuated by repeated full-band stops and Cave’s beginner’s-level electric guitar plucking out a woozy three-note vamp. It seems relatively clear that the raw, sex-crazed energy of Grinderman spilled over at least a little bit into the Bad Seeds album that would follow, and Grinderman would go on to give the world one additional album, but nothing in Cave’s long career quite equals the greasy crotch mania of Grinderman, which is all the more reason to blow off your boss, grab a couple of beers, and play this thing loud enough to wake your slumbering bones.