Grinderman -‘Grinderman 2 RMX’ (Mute)

In early 2006, me and the now Mrs. 17 Seconds went to see Nick Cave at the Edinburgh Playhouse. Although it was billed as being a Nick Cave solo show -and technically, it was not a full Bad Seeds line-up, Old Nick (sorry) was accompanied by erstwhile Bad Seeds Warren Ellis, Martyn P. Casey and Jim Sclavunos. It was this line-up that would deliver Cave’s next project, which was far more gnarly, grotty and garagey than his work under the Bad Seeds banner had been in a long time. They gave us two excellent albums in Grinderman and er, Grinderman 2.

At the end of last year at a festival in Australia, Cave told the crowd ‘”It’s over …See you all in another 10 years when we’ll be even older and uglier.” Now the band are on ‘indefinite hiatus’ although it is is said that there is a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album pencilled in for 2012 (although the three soundtrack albums that Cave has done with Ellis were great, and I’m surely not the only one who’d welcome one of these). In the meantime, though, there is this remix album.

Remix albums can be hit and miss affairs, often seemingly marking time until the next album, issued because the act in question is flailing for ideas, can’t issue another greatest hits just yet, or they haven’t acquired enough of a back catalogue to turn into a west end musical. However, Grinderman 2 RMX is pretty damn impressive.

Now, not just because most of what Nick Cave has turned his hand to over the last thirty years plus has been awesome (with the exception of his second novel, The Death Of Bunny Munro. That was crap.) – but because it actually works in its’ own right. It does, of course help that there are an impressive list of characters involved in contributing to the remixes here, including Queens Of The Stone Age’s Josh Homme, former Bad Seed Barry Adamson and the much-heralded remix of ‘Bellringer Blues’ by the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Nick Zinner. But what is even more staggering is how it actually seems to work in its own right as an album, which is a pretty rare beast for remix albums, and of course, essential in the iPod age.

Sure, some tracks are better than others – but then the same could be said about albums since time immemorial. This is not a stop-gap album, even if the likelihood of another album involving Cave is as wonderfully inevitable (barring death) as another Fall album.

Pretty impressive – for its source material, its collaborations and its end result as a whole.

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Grinderman 2 RMX is out on Mute on March 26.