Grinderman - Grinderman 2 (2010)

It's no coincidence that Warren Ellis's promotion through the ranks of the Bad Seeds has dovetailed with the Indian summer that Nick Cave's long career is now enjoying.

In Ellis, Cave has finally met his match when it comes to a breadth of ambition and ferocity of workrate. In the past six years alone, they have collaborated on two Bad Seeds LPs (one a double), two Grinderman LPs, five film soundtracks, two theatre scores and toured in a full Bad Seeds line-up, a piano-based Mini Seeds quartet and as Grinderman.

Just when most rockers are settling into a middle-aged semi-retirement (Cave is 53, Ellis is 45), these two are working like men possessed. Perhaps that's the nature of addictive personalities for you.

Cave also currently seems fascinated by how quickly he can complete projects. Having spent five years labouring over his first novel, 1989's The Ass Saw The Angel, he dashed off the second, last year's The Death Of Bunny Monroe, in just six weeks during downtime while on tour, having cannibalised the ideas from a screenplay he'd written for John Hillcoat.

Grinderman seems to be another symptom of this, with all their songs written through jamming, rather than the traditional Bad Seeds format of Cave working long and hard on his ideas in his office before presenting them to the band to be fleshed out.

He first explored this way of working in the run-up to the 2004’s Abattoir Blues/ Lyre of Orpheus, gathering the nucleus of the Bad Seeds in a small studio in Paris to thrash out some ideas as part of the songwriting process before finishing them off on his own.

The departure of Blixa Bargeld from the band following 2003's underwhelming Nocturama LP may have prompted this move in an attempt to shake things up - the result was an outstanding double album to mark the start of Cave and Ellis's hot streak together.

With Grinderman, Cave seems to be trying to cut out the subsequent redrafting as much as possible and present the ideas in the rawest possible state, with most of Grinderman 2 actually managing to sound even more off the cuff than its predecessor.

What you sometimes lose in terms of the rich frame of reference in his lyrics is traded off for the sheer energy of the band thrashing about on the edge of uncertainty.

The first Grinderman LP drew heavily on the blues (the title track/band name is indebted to Memphis Slim's Grinder Man Blues) while firing it with a rough-hewn punky spirit - but Grinderman 2 finds them turning towards a greasy, blackened psychedelia.

Much has been made of Cave picking up the guitar for the first time at the age of 50 but Ellis is primarily a violinist whose guitar skills are hardly going to earn him a job running finishing classes at the Jimmy Page School of Rock.

The two of them like to combine simple overdriven rhythms with smearing great slabs of groaning and wheezing noise over the songs, some of it coaxed out of an electric mandolin, which looks like a miniature guitar and flips all the usual cock-rock posturing on its head very nicely when played live, and some from Cave on primative-sounding keyboards. Drummer Jim Sclavunos and bassist Martyn Casey provide a solid basis, including backing vocals.

Considering the back to basics ideology, the nine songs on Grinderman 2 are surprisingly wide ranging, from the bluesy howlers Mickey Mouse And The Goodbye Man and Kitchenette to the whispered minimalism of What I Know to the strange Latino groove of When My Baby Comes, with Ellis's mournful violin suddenly turning malevolent four minutes in when the whole song rises up like a vast winged creature, elbowing Cave to the sidelines in the process.

Worm Tamer returns to the midlife crisis comedy of the band's debut album, building up to the classic pay-off: 'My baby calls me the Loch Ness Monster/ Two great big humps and then I'm gone'.

Working on all those film soundtracks seems to have an impact, with opener Mickey Mouse... and Evil both coming across like the plots to old noir movies as sinister forces move in on desperate people on the run.

Heathen Child features appearances by the Wolfman, Marilyn Monroe and the Adominable Snowman, and comes with the wonderfully daft video from The Proposition/ The Road director Hillcoat (Warning: contains scenes of Jim Sclavunos's naked backside). Palaces Of Montezuma, which finds Cave back on piano and includes a carefully crafted lyric that leaves you feeling like a Bad Seeds song somehow wandered on to the wrong album, also memorably mentions a 'A custard coloured superdream of Ali McGraw and Steve McQueen' just to keep the cinematic theme going.

The vinyl version of Grinderman 2 comes with a 16-page booklet featuring lyrics (never a good thing in my book but that's for another day) and amusing graphical interpretations of the songs by Ilinca Hopfner, plus a poster of the band standing in Roman uniforms looking bored and a CD version of the album that great for the car.

Grinderman 2 is a blast from start to finish, though it's good to know we can expect a Bad Seeds album next, with all the attendant craft that involves. Cave is one of the best lyric writers out there but you have to wonder if he's in danger of spreading himself a little thin.

When the band start singing 'We are the soul survivors' on Bellringer Blues it's hard to escape the feeling that you expect a bit more than the kind of cliches Primal Scream specialise in nowadays.

But then the first person to recognise the need for a change of direction is probably Cave, so who knows what will come next.

In the meantime, the band certainly seem to be enjoying playing the songs live, with Cave still throwing himself about onstage in Manchester recently, managing to take out part of Sclavunos's drum kit three songs in, playing keyboards with his feet and even launching himself into the crowd at one point - not bad for a man who had celebrated his 53rd birthday seven days earlier.