Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! - Dark Publications

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Editorial Reviews:

Amazon.co.uk
Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! finds Nick Cave back at the helm of his long-term band The Bad Seeds after some impressive soundtrack work--2005's The Assassination of Jesse James--and a busman's holiday in the raw, rocking Grinderman. As the title suggests, Lazarus finds Cave returning to familiar themes of God and redemption, although some of the raw poise and wild-eyed humour that resurfaced in Grinderman remains: take the opening title track, which retells the Biblical story of the resurrection of Lazarus as transposed onto the sleazy, poverty-stricken backdrop of modern-day New York City. Musically, the likes of "Moonland" and "Night of the Lotus Eaters" have a swampy feel, all skittering drums, simmering bass and smoky organ riffs; elsewhere, there are rockers that tie on dissonant guitars without losing their dissonant touch ("Lie Down Here"). Probably the album highlight comes with "We Call Upon the Author", a sprawling, "Sister Ray"-like chugger that shows off Cave's skill for magnificent, sung-shouted narratives: "Now mixamatoid kids roam the streets, we've shunned them from the greasy grind/The poor little things, they look so sad and old as they mount us from behind". --Louis Pattison

Product Description
Last seen under the gleeful guise of 2007's Grinderman, a no-nonsense rock 'n' roll excuse to head down to the basement and shout, now Nick Cave returns to his full time Bad Seeds co-conspirators for this release. "Grinderman was deliberately spare and the concepts were pretty simple," explains Cave. "With 'Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!' we allowed ourselves to get expansive." It picks up where Grinderman left off, filled with Stoogified electric guitar, driving beats, and Cave's literate, seductive, and firmly tongue-in-cheek lyrics.

Customer Reviews: Read 27 more reviews...

4 out of 5 stars

"The older he gets, the more revitalised he sounds." April 8, 2008
57 out of 62 found this review helpful

The prolific Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds have been refining and revitalising their music for decades but have not reached the end of their inventiveness yet. Severely cutting back on the trademark wailing violin and spooky piano - and with a noticeable dearth of songs about dead girls - "Dig, Lazarus Dig!!!" is rockier and funnier than the "Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orheus" offering Abattoir Blues / Lyre of Orpheus.
That 2004 dazzling double opus would have left lesser bands gasping for creative oxygen, but their thirteenth studio LP rather suggested a band with limitless artistic energy and endurance.
There's a sense of fun here - not always a mainstay of the previous 13 Bad Seeds albums - but we're back to Cave the poet, Cave the laconic chronicler, and he's being a bit more flowery about the rude stuff.
With much of the energy of the grungier "Grinderman" project Grinderman Cave et al explored last year, "Dig" is stuffed with all the literary, biblical and mythological jumble fans can usually expect.
If there is a trademark Bad Seed sound, it is most apparent in "Jesus of the Moon", in which Cave's talent for emotive narrative is accompanied by elegant flute.
As verbose and intellectual as it is scary and unsettling, "Dig" is a baffling, dark masterpiece in which Cave deliberately sets out not to deliver the sweet tones of the piano or the guitar chords which massage the pleasure centres of the psyche.
Instead we get rock constantly verging on dissonance, with squalls of sound and numbing basslines.
There are few musicians, who have never had a major record deal, yet command an ever-growing audience and, at 50, are unleashing music with all the vigour and imagination of their youth.
Nick Cave turned out astonishingly primal garage-rock with last year's Grinderman album.
Here, back with the Bad Seeds, he veers wildly between grooviness, beauty and ear-splitting white noise.
The narratives he delivers are fantastically weird: on the title track, the biblical Lazarus returns from the dead in sleazy, pre-Giuliani New York.
The song brilliantly repositions the myth of Lazarus in the moral swamp of 1970s N.Y.; with the Bad Seeds coming on like the Stooges after a funk injection, while "Moonland" is a Taxi Driver narrative with a man behind the wheel in lonely rage. "Albert Goes West" is a report of a psychotic episode which manages to rhyme 'vulva' with 'sucking a revolver'.
"We Call Upon the Author" is Cave addressing God, and chiding those who ask him to explain his songs. "I go guruing down the street", he wails, "Young people gather round my feet/Ask me things - but I don't know where to start".
Even when the maudlin "Hold On To Yourself" provides something musically straightforward - a theme which would not go amiss on the soundtrack to a spaghetti western - there is a din going on in the background which sounds like a colony of agitated bats.
Then listen to "Night Of The Lotus Eaters" and you have a clatttery blues riff around which there are guitar sounds which spookily resemble a creaking door. And then there is "Lie Down Here", whose intro sounds like a man involved in a fight to the death with feedback. This is one mean, ornery album. But it is not in the mould of the primeval Grinderman project.
It's much cleverer than that. "Dig" is, by Cave's own testimony, more expansive, teasing us with glimpses of psychedelia. You could draw comparisons as diverse as Tom Waits and The Fall, but "Dig" is simply great on its own terms.
It is a confident album by musicians who are not simply singing the songs they know will sell and it is an interesting, exciting and often irreverent offering. Adult, funny, packed with Freudian allusion and apocalyptic dread, it really is magnificent stuff.
Download : "We Call Upon the Author", "Midnight Man" and "Jesus On The Moon".

3 out of 5 stars

Ignore that Grating Sound--It's Just My Hype Alarm Going Off April 13, 2008
18 out of 59 found this review helpful

There comes a time when a great songwriter's work eventually builds a monument of such indisputable glory that fans and media alike exchange objective criticism for the kind of polite noise everyone's making about the latest from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Dig!! Lazarus Dig!!!, as if to handle their work with the remotest honesty is to befoul the names of the gods. Let me make one thing clear: Nick Cave has without any doubt attained the heights of rock `n roll divinity, but that doesn't mean he can't be pulled to the ground when he asks for it. And with Lazarus, he doesn't just ask-he begs.

The several talking songs on Lazarus (like "Night of the Lotus Eaters" or the title track) betray a presumptuousness that undercuts Cave's performances here, a combination of indifference and indulgence that suggests Nick's been reading his own clippings. Instead we get a self-congratulatory Cave luxuriating in the density of his own chiseled lines while spitting stale similes like "you came on like a punch in the heart," accidentally stumbling here and there into a vocal melody that almost approximates song. The band accompanies Cave in a drunken nausea of whiny violins and one-chord riffs that condemn most tracks to the monotone rut Cave is so clearly steeped in. At times, as on the entirely discordant "Midnight Man" or "Moonland," the band simply collapses into an unlistenable jazz of dispassion. It's all noise and no nuance this time around-the exact inversion of everything Cave fans expect of this otherwise brilliant man.

When Cave released the jam-packed double album Abattoir Blues in 2004, a mature masterpiece that integrated the blistering abandon of his Birthday Party days with the brooding balladry of Boatman's Call, he suggested that fans ought to listen to disc one first, and then resort to disc 2 only when they grew hungry for a new Nick Cave album. Well, I find myself famished after listening to Lazarus, and so you'll understand if I return now to the Abattoir to get my fill.

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5 out of 5 stars

Picking up where Grinderman left off... April 9, 2008
17 out of 52 found this review helpful

There are a few songwriters who have taken the English language and crafted it into something entirely different. A brief list of some of my favorite songwriters comes to mind: Kris Kristofferson, Tom Waits, Hank Williams, Jackson Browne, Bob Dylan, and perhaps Sting (somebody, somewhere, is arguing these last two; too bad, this is MY review, and I stand by it). This list isn't anywhere near complete, of course, but it serves to give you an example of the category we should file Nick Cave into. If, of course, you can put him in one simple category (I don't recommend wasting your time trying to do this).

With Nick Cave, of course, it isn't just about the lyrics. A Nick Cave record is an aural experience--a delight the which you've only dreamed of. This is thanks in large part to the rest of the Bad Seeds, expert musicians who specialize in f***ing things up (in a good way). Take, for instance, the title track here, with Cave bellowing "I want you to dig!" over pounding electric guitars. Or the metafictional songwriting forray "We Call Upon the Author," with the enduring chant: "Prolix, prolix, nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!" Or the groove of the Odyssean epic "More News from Nowhere." Or the gentle, romantic sway of "Jesus of the Moon."

Basically, DIG, LAZARUS, DIG!!! picks up where the Grinderman project left off, this time with ALL of the Bad Seeds contributing. It's nice to see Cave rocking the f*** out again (am I cursing too much?). There really isn't much of a title for music like this; I think "rock" comes closest to it. If you aren't familiar with Nick Cave: I'm not sure how you wound up here...but buy the record and see what you've been missing. If you're a longtime fan, or a recent one, then I'm not sure why you're actually reading this, but you, too, should buy the record. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds are one of the most interesting things the music world has to offer us nowadays; in this world of fake celebrities and Pro-Tools and reality-show singers, it's nice to see a guy who just doesn't give a rat's petoot about doing anything other than making music HIS way. Here's to Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, for helping to keep this thing we call art honest and sincere.

4 out of 5 stars

The album Grinderman should have been May 12, 2008
14 out of 32 found this review helpful

Before the release of Grinderman, I remember getting all excited reading that Nick Cave was coming out with hard rocking album. Unfortunately, the CD didn't live up to my expectations, it struck me as more of a throwaway than a committed project. But at least I didn't have long to wait for the real goods. Dig Lazarus Dig is everything I had been hoping for in a rocking Nick Cave release, full-fledged songs, fun yet biting lyrics, a diversity of musical styles, moments of pensiveness and beauty, and oh yeah, it really really jams. Welcome back, Nick!

I don't understand why some reviewers are knocking this album. This, to me, is not the sound of Nick Cave in a rut, this is the sound of Nick and the Bad Seeds revitalized. We all love Nick Cave the twisted balladeer, the lounge singer with the dark tortured soul of an Ingmar Bergman, the pensive Nick Cave of The Good Son, Murder Ballads, The Boatman's Call, No More Shall We Part and The Lyre of Orpheus/Abbatoir Blues, but staying in that same mode ad infinitum would have constituted the true rut. It was time for a change, and Lazarus indicates a deviation in focus I ardently applaud, even if it turns out to be for one album only. Nick's characteristic snarl is still here, but he seems to be having more fun this time around. Does that make some of the lyrics less deep than what we're accustomed to? Maybe, but that doesn't mean they're not every bit as intelligent and literate and black as before. Nick has opted for a more absurdist lyrical style on several of the songs, going off on bizarre tangents while spinning his characteristically sardonic narratives, and frankly I'm not always sure what the hell he's singing about, but the results are damned entertaining nonetheless. As for the musical element, I like the sound of Nick Cave cutting loose. This might be the closest thing to a party album that Nick and the Bad Seeds ever release, and it is appropriately raunchy, but that doesn't make it negligible. The title song which opens the album, and We Call Upon the Author, positioned directly at the middle, and the closing More News From Nowhere are the key tracks here, setting the mood of theater of the absurd spontaneity, but they aren't necessarily the strongest. This is a hook-laden album, with Nick's pop sensibilities in full swing. In addition to those three songs, I really love Today's Lesson, Hold On To Yourself, Lie Down Here(& Be My Girl) and Midnight Man. Besides its melodic invention and lyrical, flamboyance, Lazarus has the added advantage of being far from a one note adventure; musical ideas abound. Night of the Lotus Eaters employs what sounds like a steel drum, Hold On To Yourself and Jesus Of the Moon are beautiful ballads in the tradition of his more recent albums, but with some musical twists(Hold On has a distinctly western twang), and Lie Down Here is a barroom sizzler, the kind of all out assault Nick and the boys haven't done for a while(not counting Grinderman), with an irresistible melody and a propulsive performance by the band. Lazarus might be Nick's most American album, with its nods to American music and its darkly comic examinations of American celebrity and culture.

Some may argue with Nick's change in direction, I find it exhilarating. To the naysayers, criticize this album if you must, but please don't accuse Nick Cave of getting stale. For me this album is a refreshing change of pace, with the emphasis on fresh.

4 out of 5 stars

A darkly funny album which takes the usual Nick Cave skill in an unusual direction. June 8, 2008
13 out of 13 found this review helpful

Evidently reinvigorated by his mid-life-crisis stint in punk-rock incarnation Grinderman, Nick Cave returns with Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! - a thrilling, sprawling album.
Its themes of sex, death and religion, and its cast of strange shadowy creatures occupying a rich and looming musical landscape are familiar, but there is definitely a new energy at play.
The magnificent "Jesus of the Moon" - one of several tracks where Cave trades his preacher-man delivery for that of a storyteller - is among the finest moments of his career, and there's much more to rave about besides. Now 50 and no longer the menacing figure he was during the decades he maintained a heroin habit, Nick Cave has become a prodigious artist(responsible for soundtracks, screenplays and essays as well as his solo material) who ranks alongside the likes of Bob Dylan and Tom Waits.
The backdrops to these narratives and speculations range from churning rock'n'roll vamps, barrages of distorted guitar noise and hypnotic chants, to the shimmering mandolin and viola, caressed with tender breaths of flute, that multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis conjures up for the beautiful "Jesus of the Moon".
There's more than enough on here - the wonderfully morbid lyrics, the almost animal guitar sounds and, of course, that voice - to savour.
"Jesus of the Moon" has some of the Bad Seeds signature sound.
The track would fit in better on "The Good Son" than it does surrounded by rock 'n' roll tunes like the title song.
"Night of the Lotus Eaters" has a distinctive Grinderman feel and "More News From Nowhere" more obviously presents the band's earlier musical characteristics.
"Dig" is a confident album by musicians who are not simply singing the songs they know will sell and it is an interesting, exciting and often irreverent offering.
My favourute tracks are : "Jesus of the Moon", "We Call Upon the Author", "More News From Nowhere", "Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!", and "Today's Lesson".

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