Grinderman’s second album comes on the heels of both the success of Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! and Mick Harvey’s departure from the Bad Seeds. Harvey wasn’t a member of Grinderman, so that didn’t necessarily have a direct musical impact here, but the context is still useful. Grinderman 2 is not as universally explosive as the first album, but it does expand the band’s driving, lusty garage punk in some interesting, experimental ways. “Mickey Mouse And The Goodbye Man” kicks things off with familiar noise to set one’s teeth on edge, but the album soon takes plenty of turns for the weirder. Just as with the first Grinderman album, though, very little about Grinderman 2 feels over-thought. The basic instrumental skeletons are still thin, but the band floats even more flourishes atop those frames.

“When My Baby Comes” rides a similar soft groove to some of the Lazarus material, but then “What I Know” evacuates almost everything from the picture, leaving Cave to whisper-croon on top of crackling hiss, a submerged drum hit, and eerie vocal treatments. “Evil” unfurls a shuffling dirge that sounds a little like late-era Radiohead on a bad trip, but then “Palaces Of Montezuma” is simply one of the loveliest songs that Cave and his crew have put together since No More Shall We Part. The lyrical content is no less wry and obscene than on the first Grinderman album, but it is much less singularly focused on sexual carryings-on, with Cave indulging in flights of fancy that are equally disquieting and surreal. Still, as far as libidinous banter goes, “Worm Tamer” features one of Cave’s best one-liners in ages: “Well, my baby calls me the Loch Ness Monster:/ Two great big humps, and then I’m gone.”

The album closes with “Bellringer Blues,” reminding all and sundry just how often Cave apparently feels squeezed and pinched by some kind of blues (“Abbatoir Blues,” “No Pussy Blues,” the upcoming “Higgs Boson Blues,” and so on). More importantly, though, it rides a grinding loop and sturdy drum beat off into a fire-ringed horizon, with lyrics that subconsciously bridge the chasm between “Let The Bells Ring” and “Lay Me Low” while pledging fealty to neither and spitting on the band’s amps with a snotty electric guitar lead. Grinderman 2 isn’t as strong or immediate an album as Grinderman, but it presented enough of a digression — both from the first album and from anything in the Bad Seeds’ repertoire — to make one wish the band had kept at it, just to see what other lands had yet to be visited with scuzzy brimstone.