Is it just me, or in the video, does Nick Cave not have any facial hair?…
[Video][Website]
[5.89]
Michaelangelo Matos: Joke bands eventually take the gag seriously, often on the second album. Especially when they’re the side projects of very serious artistes.
[5]
Alex Macpherson: Thundering beats and explosions of electricity do their best, but can’t lend any interest to this turgid litany of clichés about yet another vulnerable-but-sexy-but-dangerous nubile female that Nick Cave is fixating on. He is such a middle-aged accountant.
[3]
Anthony Easton: Listening to the 30 minute breakdown of Cohen’s Tower of Song the other night, I thought to myself: will there be anybody ever who is cooler then Nick Cave? All of the black angels of Rock and Roll, from Elvis to Cash must have met sometime in the pre-existence and decided that he would keep their legacy full and forward.
[9]
Mallory O’Donnell: I honestly prefer Cave when he most resembles some darkside Neil Diamond, but this is far better than most of the Grinderman material, which seems based on the curious notion that he is at his best when rockin’ out. Part of it is that Warren Ellis has been given enough room to create amazing bleating android sheep noises, and part of it is that Old Nick appears to have written his lyrics and recorded his vocals at midnight, in the spooky forest, on a two-day bender and in five minutes. Also, it’s apparently a 7″. From 2010.
[7]
Alfred Soto: If I must listen to one of the biggest emotional frauds of the last thirty years, I’d rather his scrappy untutored guitar mediated. There’s still the matter of Cave, alas – when he means to sound sinister he just sounds arch. That ain’t no way to play the blues.
[5]
Rebecca Toennessen: A bit of Vic Reeves-esque club style singing, like heavy caramel over a thick, crunchy guitar, coated with some inoffensive, chocolate-y, rhythms. The Twix bar of rock.
[6]
David Raposa: Unlike (yeah I’m going there) “No Pussy Blues” — which ably played Nick Cave’s hard-up carny sprawl against the music’s sinister and cathartic precision — this tune’s more sound than fury. Bless his bitter soul, Cave’s grinding his organ a little too hard here to really earn those awesome spikes of distortion that rear their head during the intro and outro. But those amplifier flare-ups — reminiscent (to me) of the broke-ass sounds Jack White coaxed from his equipment circa Icky Thump, except (editorial alert) put to better use — are nearly good enough to have this track realize its delusions of grand squalor. (Note to those wondering why my forgiving score might not match my crotchety rhetoric: pretend I gave this track a 6.5, and rounded up because of Cave’s facial hair.)
[7]
Mark Sinker: Try as I might, what I hear is a group of hairy folks with a self-consciously out-there record collection trying to turn the concept of U2’s “Desire” into a song that doesn’t suck. And, um, failing.
[4]
Additional Scores
Martin Skidmore: [7]