Grinderman “Grinderman”

Release Date: April 10

Record Label: Anti

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Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Grinderman’s self-titled debut is the type of beautifully raw, joyously raucous record Jack White has been fruitlessly trying to make for a decade.

Formed with members of the touring incarnation of the Bad Seeds and fronted by the venerable Nick Cave, Grinderman’s music is drenched in booze, sex, frustration, despair and a dash of self-loathing. The record is rock music boiled down to its most simplistic, primordial elements. Without pomp, pretension or delusion, “Grinderman” is part mid-life crisis for Cave and company and part death of the traditional American rock star.

Cave, who is famous for his lyrical dexterity, black humor and occasional fits on the piano, decided to pick up the guitar seriously for the first time in his career on this record. While Cave proves himself no virtuoso, “Grinderman” is full of effects-drenched, distortion-heavy slinking riffs and occasional bits of off-kilter melody. “Grinderman” isn’t the most accessible record of Cave’s career, but its off-the-cuff vibe and lo-fi aesthetic harken back to Delta Blues brought kicking and screaming into a new era.

Tunes such as the trippy, effects heavy “Electric Alice” and the mellow “Chain of Flowers” set the perfect juxtaposition throughout “Grinderman.” It’s often unclear which Nick Cave will show up from song to song, the brooding tunesmith or the angry middle-aged rocker showing the current generation of musicians just how it’s done.

The electric strut of “Don’t Set Me Free,” the lounge feel of “Decoration Day” and the gravel-voiced ballad “Man on the Moon” help cultivate Cave’s singer/songwriter side. In direct contrast, however, are tunes such as the psychedelic freak out “Love Bomb,” and the revival-gone-awry organ squeals of “Honey Bee.”

Much of “Grinderman” is beautiful in its simplicity and it’s not unfathomable to imagine Cave’s songs “Go Tell the Women” and the hilariously ribald “No P—y Blues” being sung by the likes of Robert Johnson or Blind Lemon Jefferson.

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The best thing than can be said about both Grinderman the band and “Grinderman” the album is that each represents things rarely seen in today’s rock band: wit, intelligence and fury. It’s just ironic that it took four fifty-year-old men to show the kids how to play rock.

Much has been made in recent years of the throwback aesthetic of bands such as The White Stripes, The Darkness, Molfmother, The Strokes and a host of others, but where those bands are pale imitations of blues-rock hybrids of decades gone by, Grinderman is the genuine article.