Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!, by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (LP on Mute)

	Description:	LP and bonus 7" on Mute
	Format:	LP
	Label:	Mute
	Price:	£15.99
	Catalogue number:	STUMM 277
	Availability:	sorry, but this item is not available / sold out. (Other items may be available!)

What you say

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Last 1 review(s):

Rating: ecstatic This record left Ashley K. feeling ecstatic.

As someone who admittedly only started listening to Nick Cave (&the Bad Seeds) about 5 years ago, each record I've discovered has grown on me, but none have struck me quite like "Dig, Lazarus, Dig!" I can remember when I first heard glimmers of the title track and fantasized that the new album would be quite swell. Was I ever surprised when I got the record and it was even better than I thought. From "Today's Lesson" grinding on about a pedophile of the night to "We Call Upon the Author to Explain" grilling God and non-believers alike, I just can't stop listening to this. I highly recommend it. And for those looking for something with a similar sound, I would suggest Tom McKean & the Emperors.

Review date: 25 July 2008

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What the label says:

LP 12'' + 7''
Component 1
Side 1
1.    Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!
2.    Today's Lesson
3.    Moonland
4.    Night Of The Lotus Eaters
5.    Albert Goes West
Side 2
1.    We Call Upon The Author
2.    Hold On To Yourself
3.    Lie Down Here (And Be My Girl)
4.    Jesus Of The Moon
5.    Midnight Man
Component 2
Side 1
1.    More News From Nowhere (Part 1)
Side 2
1.    More News From Nowhere (Part 2)

Maybe there’s just a feeling something is missing. It’s hard to pin down, difficult to articulate; maybe it’s just the instinctive knowledge that it’s time for a new album from Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds - who else can be relied upon during days like these?

The Bad Seeds is an ongoing mission for Nick Cave and his confreres and in the last two years, this evolutionary quest has sped up to an intoxicating pace. Last seen out in public under the gleeful guise of Grinderman, a no-nonsense rock’n’roll excuse to “head down to the basement and shout”, now Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds hit the elevator button straight back up to the cerebral penthouse suite with their fourteenth album, DIG, LAZARUS, DIG!!! “A haemorrhaging of words and ideas,” is how Cave describes the follow-up to 2004’s gloriously compendious Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus double. “Grinderman was deliberately spare and the concepts were pretty simple,” he explains. “With DIG, LAZARUS, DIG!!! we allowed ourselves to get expansive.”

That’s no understatement. DIG, LAZARUS, DIG!!! is elusive, allusive and - what the hell - illusive, a dizzying narrative that unrolls Western civilisation from Homer to Freud, the Bible to the Beats, fitting in its own cast of mythical characters along the way. Little Janie and the sinister Mr. Sandman lock into a grim dance on Today’s Lesson, a blast of sexual politics crammed into one nasty rock’n’roll fable; the roaming spirits of Albert Goes West go on an interstate rampage through psychotic episodes and dive bar beers; while poor Lazarus finds himself lost and alone on the title track’s dense compression of New Testament miracles, Victorian spiritualism and New York decadence. Then there’s the pyrotechnic rant We Call Upon The Author (To Explain), which subtly and self-mockingly sets Cave The Songwriter in the dock, challenges God to account for himself and sets a literary feud (“Bukowski was a jerk! Berryman was best!!!”) to an irresistible beat.