Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Dig, Lazarus, Dig !!!

A fantastic double album is as heavy a trophy for a band as a prize-winning book is for a novelist: What kind of encore wont disappoint? Nick Cave, who with the Bad Seeds nailed down both length and depth with 2004s Abattoir Blues / The Lyre Of Orpheus, sidestepped the question, writing a western movie (The Proposition) and then forming Grinderman, a group practically engineered to let him blow off pressure.

The three exclamation points at the end of Dig, Lazarus, Dig !!!, the title of Cave & the Bad Seeds fourteenth studio album, are evidence that ripping through Dept Charge Ethel and No Pussy Blues significantly toned and tautened Caves senses of humor and proportion.

Because this is Nick Cave, the humor is as black as Johnny Cashs wardrobe, and proportion isnt measured by an early scale. His rock n roll is never only rock n roll; its heave and hell and the world between, not to mention the supposed creator of all that, whom he attempts to summon with due respect and rage in We Call Upon The Author.

Cave & the Bad Seeds also summon the early, primitive-lust Stooges with Todays Lesson, evoke Hammer Studios horror movies with Night Of the Lotus Eaters, and heavily modernize an infamous second-string resurrection with the title track. Skillfully unleashing cacophony and sweeping elegantly through balladic grandeur, and possessing a mien that still lurches along like a graveyard shadow of Elvis Presley and Screamin Jay Hawkins, Cave likes it heavy, all right, but he isnt weighed down by any trophies.