"(I Don't Need You To) Set Me Free", by Grinderman. Sometimes I have to do things backwards. Nick Cave's Grinderman project I took to be a letting off of steam, and after one listen I decided that I was too old to listen to Grinderman's kind of music, even if Nick Cave wasn't too old to, like, make it. But I could hear what its seeds had grown into on "Dig Lazarus Dig!!!", and I suppose I had no choice but to go back and do some re-planting. In retrospect "Grinderman", while it still sounds like a half-way house, is a remarkable collection of songs more or less documenting the kind of unrequited lust that I assume those around 50 years of age succumb to (unless you are, say, Pablo Picasso, or maybe Hugh Hefner - if the latter, in fact, gets any, or just swans around his mansion in his dressing gown, surrounded by scantily clad young females, because that's what he likes to do, and how weird would that be?). The song I have chosen, though, doesn't climb the walls like a horny and desparate lower primate, it is rather a straightforward slow blues, two chords only, the Grinderman boys lurching into a drunken vocal stumble during the fade.
And a query: Is Grinderman the only Nick Cave band-type thing that hasn't included Mick Harvey? The answer depends on whether Harvey was involved in the Immaculate Consumptive junkie-super-group. Which I don't know. Anyone?
