If I began this how I’d initially thought, with some sort of high-handed espousing that “there are far too few living singer/songwriters that capture the” bla bla bla whatever gothic intensity of Nick Cave bla bla, it really would have rolled many, many eyes. Mine included.

Instead, I will leave it at this: Nick Cave’s a fucking genius. I’ve seen him live, which is not something a lot of folks under the age 0f 40 living in the U.S. can say, and I’ve been pushed by him during “Red Right Hand”, which, I must imagine, has an even smaller percentage of relateability. The bar-room fist-fight project Grinderman, from last year, must still be coursing through his veins a bit, because that whiskey-drunk, molester-’stached oily Nick has overtaken the velvet smoking jacket Nick that prevailed on his last few albums with the Bad Seeds.

It’s fitting, though, because the sound of the new Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds album, Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! is rowdier and dirtier than any of his most glass-jagged output in recent years, and therefore essentially a more lyrically-heavy bridge from unhinged piano ballads like And No More Shall We Part into the Nick Cave of old. Grinderman, one could say, gave Nick his mojo back. Dirty old man mojo, for certain, but that’s how and why we love him. I’ve been living with Lazarus (oh, the pun!) for a moment, and though at first I didn’t really dig (another pun! I’m so…oh, god, sorry) much of it, the fact that a couple of these songs, and more than a handful of Cave’s twists of wordplay, have lodged themselves in my head only goes to prove that it’s a much, much better album than I at first thought.

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds: Lie Down Here And Be My Girl

It’s possible my initial distaste for this record came from songs like this, songs with everything in both form and content cranked up to 11. Funny, though, this is the song that screamed to be posted here. Insane from the first note, sonic and disturbing, this is the sort of storytelling that’s trademark Nick:

“My girl
you lost a foe
And you found a friend
Lie down here and be my girl
I’m back now, baby, that man
He won’t be coming round here again
Lie down here and be my girl”

Over Warren Ellis’ incredible bar-rock fender, Nick coos and intones as though he still has his woman’s other man’s blood on his hands. There’s no amount of exposition to this song that can bring the twisted glee it, itself contains.

The video for the album’s title track and first single, with that Nick swagger and sway and one of the coolest fucking choruses to come out of rock in recent memory. Also, that organ? It’s as big and fat as, well, you can make your own very, very obvious phallic reference here.

Again, I say: Nick’s got his mojo back, and it, apparently, is in the moustache.