Welcome back to Grinderman's 21st century stucco fuck-pad, and this time it's bestial: our titular hero has been reincarnated as an anthro-pomo-morphised sci-fi Brundlefly dressed in Fedora, feather boa and leather coat. Be warned, this set is not what you'd call a showcase for Nick Cave's ballad-writing chops. 'Palaces of Montezuma', a lovely soul devotional somewhere between Bowie, Blake and Bob, is about the most conventional tune here. The rest is a horny noise. Grinderman 2 might best be described as an recombinant sonic machine that blenders electric funk, prog rock, free jazz, punk and musique concrete into a great multicoloured yawn that'll pebbledash your walls.
It's only when you've got someone like Warren Ellis bringing the noise that you can kick off what is ostensibly a surrealist blues album with the line “Woke up this morning” and not get laughed out of court. As the opening 'Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man' gene-splices Howlin' Wolf and Big Black, it becomes apparent that producer Nick Launey's outdone himself in terms of dynamic range and volume ratios. Cave vamps on the mic, reeling off phone numbers, shreds of blues language and lunar-tune howls, while Sclavunos and Casey keep the centrifugal rhythm machine a-spinning. 'Heathen Child' is a frothy, frotting rite of spring – if spring were moved to Samhain – and 'Kitchenette' a steamy suburban back door man jam that crosses the line between lust and cannibalism – if there is a line. One frequently thinks of Physical Graffiti produced by Steve Albini.
This is, at times, profoundly discomfiting music. 'Bellringer Blues' is a pitchshifting prostate massage of a tune that incorporates bits of Funkadelic's Free Your Mind and Miles's On the Corner, and frequently sounds like it's in breach of some sort of fundamental cosmic law. Grinderman have concocted a sort of musical interzone where everything is permitted and nothing is taboo, where Jethro Tull and Robert Fripp can co-exist with Suicide and Spacemen 3 and the Stooges and Sly Stone and Dr Teeth and the Electric Mayhem. Pan might have tooted his flute on a score of gatefold sleeves but he was a randy old bugger too. The sum total of Grinderman 2's meta-physical, uh, thrust? He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.