I saw the Meat Puppets

One perk of being in (or around) Washington D.C. so far: I find myself, for perhaps the first time in my life, faced with more concerts to go to than I have time for. Those who have been in big cities for longer than I can testify whether or not this is a mixed blessing, but I find especially due to the fact that D.C. isn’t really that huge, that the overall community here is less noxious.

(Mendy visited me in D.C. a little more than a week ago and one thing that we both happened to observe independently is the lack of noticeably straight-edge people walking around, at concerts or on the Metro. We were both under the impression, given that this is where straight-edge was born and the hometown of Minor Threat, Bad Brains, Rites of Spring et al, that such observances would happen at least occasionally. So far, nothing. Too bad I can’t shuttle back and forth from here to c. 1985 or so on weekends, to play catchup.)

So I went to see the Meat Puppets, along with Retribution Gospel Choir, at a tiny venue called the Rock ‘N’ Roll Hotel (spelling “rock ‘n’ roll” is always awkward, isn’t it?). Meanwhile, Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood were playing nearby at the Verizon Center, with tickets there going for $50+, a fact I am only aware of because I heard a bunch of drunk blooze goobers on the way back on the Metro (a guy with spray-on hair striking up a conversation with an Italian woman, yelling, “I’m a guitarist, I’m a blues player! I’m a big fan of soul—Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye—have you heard of them?” Italian lady: “Do you know Ben Harper?”).

Now, Clapton and Winwood both have their shiny guitar moments (Winwood is tragically known mostly as a keyboard player today, maybe for his association with Hendrix on “Voodoo Chile,” but his slow-burning solo on “Dear Mr. Fantasy” is a psychedelic classic and certainly Traffic’s finest moment [and I would know, having heard plenty of Traffic vis-à-vis my father]). Neither of them can compare with Curt Kirkwood in his 1982-1987 prime. Not in terms of skill, not in terms of formal/melodic invention, whatever. My opinion about this is very resolute, even though I know I keep dumping on Clapton and yet I’m a pretty big fan of the Yardbirds, Cream, Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Blind Faith and Derek & the Dominoes (Delaney & Bonnie can suck it, however). Curt Kirkwood is an enormously skilled player, and he is easily the best and perhaps only reason to see the Meat Puppets today, particularly when he takes liberty with the material at hand and does his fingerpicking thing.

The opening act was Retribution Gospel Choir, starring another guy people don’t often think as a guitar god, Alan Sparhawk of Low. As a matter of fact, this band is pretty much Low as far as I can tell. Same bassist, at least. My own theory is that this band would not exist if not for the fact that drummer Mimi Parker needed to stay home and fulfill her Mormon duty by taking care of her and Sparhawk’s children, so Sparhawk just started a new band with a new drummer, who by the way was all right. I am not familiar with Retribution Gospel Choir’s album, but it did not take me long to figure out that the first song they were playing was simply a heavy, power-trio version of the Low song “Breaker,” from Drums and Guns. At the time, I thought, Wow, what a rocking improvement over the original, but having gone back to the original song since, which happens to have this amazingly intense simplicity to it, I now am in a continuous state of oscillation, being predisposed towards power-trio sounds anyway. At their core, though, Retribution Gospel Choir functions basically the same way as Low: songs that sound generic, or slow and boring, that you realize are actually clever and full of killer melodies, often injected with heartbreaking sounds. Amp up the “generic” factor a little bit, but not enough to be offensive, and you basically have Retribution Gospel Choir. If I heard any of this on classic rock radio however many decades from now, I wouldn't be too surprised.

After that, the Meat Puppets came on, the brothers Kirkwood looking harried and bored, although Cris Kirkwood kind of took on the role of resident goofball, in that he actually looked at and acknowledged the presence of an audience. Also, they had a new rent-a-drummer named Ted Marcus, apparently a former sound engineer for MTV. Those who know me know my intense physical displeasure whenever musicians, but particularly drummers, are rotated out of bands I like and audiences are presumed not to notice or care, but in this case I was simply unable to convince myself that their original drummer Derrick Bostrom was really a key ingredient on par with Grant Hart, Steve Shelley, Earl Hudson, or even Murph, what with his fairly rudimentary time-keeping skills. Anyhow, Ted Marcus did a good job.

I said before that Curt Kirkwood was really the only reason to pay $16 for this, as the band started their set with the title track from their latest album Sewn Together, this was made abundantly clear. I listened to it once, but I will defer to Curt Kirkwood’s expert assessment of the material, saying something to the effect that it sounds like a kid’s fruit juice commercial. Mind you, this is the actual artist describing his own music in this way, and not some critic. Not a good sign. And “Sewn Together” is a fairly generic mid-tempo county song that bears the dubious distinction of being really bad. When Curt started playing a solo, though, my ears perked up, and you could tell that Curt suddenly got a lot more interested, very occasionally indulging in guitar posturing and reacting with pleasure at crowd noise.

Those of you who like me are mostly fans of the Meat Puppets for their first three albums were rewarded intermittently with classic tracks. They played quite a lot from their 90s repertoire, which isn’t that bad but doesn’t have the singular vibe that Meat Puppets, II and Up On The Sun have. They did play the Nirvana-mandated “big three” from Meat Puppets II—being “Oh, Me,” “Plateau,” and “Lake of Fire,” in that order. All three were played somewhat differently and benefited from reworkings that highlighted Curt’s substantial guitar improvisations. As I was standing basically in front next to Curt, I could see him at work on the effects pedals, of which I noticed there were fewer than J. Mascis had. His way of playing through multiple registers is harder than one thinks (think of the first few bars of “Plateau” or “Aurora Borealis”) and you could tell that he changed some of the keys the songs were in to make them easier to play (or maybe sing).

Nevertheless. The undoubted highlight was an extended jam of “Up On The Sun,” played amazingly even faster than it was on record (let no one doubt that Curt can play the lead lines as clean and well-phrased as ever). The audience seemed to eat it up, even as the rhythm section started going in places that didn’t really resemble the original song at all. Another highlight for me was the instrumental “I’m A Mindless Idiot,” filtered through some sort of volume/phase pedal that finally explained to me how Curt got some of the effects that have eluded me for so long. Also, the encore of “Lost” was exhaustingly good, and they finished with their biggest hit “Backwater,” a remnant of the post-Nirvana years that is all right as a song but is fantastic as an example of how influence in the underground rock world is often reciprocal.

Tragically not represented at all was their first, most legitimately hardcore album, an album that few people seem to like. It certainly isn’t much of a gem, songwriting-wise, but I always liked it because it shows even then how inimitable a guitar style Curt Kirkwood has. If anyone ever tells you that the 80s don’t have the guitar gods to stack up to previous decades, tell them how full of shit they are simply by citing any of a number of bands from Our Band Could Be Your Life: D. Boon, Bob Mould, Roger Miller, Greg Ginn, Bob Stinson, and J. Mascis. Add to this the slightly more dubious proposition of Paul Leary, or Thurston Moore/Lee Ranaldo, or Ian MacKaye/Guy Picciotto. Add to this Dr. Know and Curt Kirkwood, absent from the book. Who among these is not brilliant, singular, a true hero of the form? Who are these morons who continue to propagate the theory that punk was the domain of the harmonically simple-minded? Rolling Stone, probably. Even when the songwriting is lax, which one can say of the original Meat Puppets as well as Sewn Together, one can still derive some sort of rudimentary pleasure in identifying the style of someone who couldn’t play otherwise if he or she tried. This is the key to the artistic success of the Meat Puppets, and the reason why they deserve just as much as Clapton to play at the Verizon Center, cranking out another solo for the zillionth time of some classic tune that, at its best, can remind you of why you found it revelatory in the first place.

25

I refuse to post this on Facebook (seems like a bad idea) so I will do it here.

1. One of my biggest pet peeves, and I have no idea where this comes from, is that I am constantly bothered when someone else takes my seat in class. I always make it my goal on the first day of class to stake out a particular place in the classroom I want to sit, and because generally there are no assigned seating arrangements, chances are someone else will get to class before I do and I will have to find some other place to sit. This always bothers me a lot, although I never do anything about it.

2. One thing I am semi-consciously aware of is that I will often adopt the syntax or certain stylistic tropes of certain writers when having conversations. This usually happens when I am reading a lot of a particular writer I like, and it's kind of embarrassing. Thankfully, people don't notice when I do this most of the time. I noticed this particularly during my DFW phase back in September or so of last year, adopting a sort of meandering formalized style punctuated by lots of parenthetical jargony stuff (see what I mean?).

3. Lately, I've been thinking that I might have some very mild form of Asperger's Syndrome. I base this on the fact that I've noticed how bad I am in most situations where I have to hold a conversation, and also because of the sheer multitude of things I happen to not pick up on.

4. While others measure their life according to where they may be or the relationships they may have, I divide my life into a series of which albums I am most obsessed with at the time. Listening to certain albums after their prime listening period will always bring up a lot of associations. Right now, I think the album that most defines my life is either "Country Life" by Roxy Music or the Congos' "Heart of the Congos."

5. Despite the fact that I consider myself to be primarily a visual learner, I will almost always take a minimum of notes in class and in my day to day activities. I will almost never take notes in class unless it happens to be things written on the board, and I never do things like highlight readings for homework, and I never write in the margins of books. I noticed a year or so ago that if I think a phrase or point is notable enough for me to highlight, chances are that I will remember it anyway, so it doesn't make much sense to point out something I already know.

6. I'm not really one to play air guitar along to songs very often, but I am almost a compulsive air drummer, albeit mainly (not always) when no one else is around. This is probably because there are no actual drums for me to beat on most of the time, and sometimes I really feel a need to play them.

7. Unlike most of my friends, I have a larger appreciation and a wider set of knowledge of mainstream/superhero comics, and this has been the case since I was very young. As with anything else, I tend to choose the comics I read based on the writers I like. Some of my favorite comic writers include Alan Moore (of course) Grant Morrison, Brian Wood, Matt Fraction, Jonathan Hickman, Peter Milligan and Jason Aaron. These are the authors that I will read pretty much anything from, and you'll notice that they are pretty much all authors who divide their work between crazy creator-owned work with revisionist, high-quality takes on superhero comics.

8. I was remarking to someone not long ago that I think I have absolutely no concept of "cute." I almost never refer to anything or anyone as cute, and when I do, chances are I have no idea what I'm talking about. Cuteness, broadly defined, has no basis in my life, and doesn't really measure anything I would find valuable. This probably has something to do with my larger inability to gauge what is aesthetically pleasing.

9. I also think be a closet agoraphobe as well. I noticed this my freshman year of college, when I became supremely uncomfortable every time I was in the dining hall, although that has more or less passed. Still, large crowds of people probably disturb me more than they do most people I know.

10. I have completely excised the words "overrated" and "underrated" from my vocabulary, particularly when voicing criticism. I believe they are useless and overused words whose only function is that people (indie sorts of crowds specifically) use them as a shorthand for criticism. I don't find any criticism genuine that uses the standards of whether or not other people like or dislike it--chances are, you are just trying to to impress people with how novel your views are. When people tell me that, say, the Beatles are "overrated," chances are I will roll my eyes because (apart from how typical of a statement that is now) it doesn't seem to show any real thought or consideration to the actual music.

11. I have a preponderance for making lists, which used to be a lot worse than it is now. When I was bored in class, I would often make lists of favorite movies, books, candy, whatever. My friend Jim once remarked that if I were a low-rent Batman villain, I would be "The List," who would go around Gotham City committing petty crimes and leaving notes like "Top 10 Reasons Why Batman Can't Stop Me."

12. I have an extremely non-addictive personality. There have been many times when I have entertained the thought of, say, becoming a raging alcoholic, but I can't ever summon up the will to go through with it, because frankly I won't feel like it after not too long.

13. I took a jazz improvisation class last block and I learned just how much jazz was not for me. The continued emphasis of playing with a purely melodic sensibility, and the fact that I couldn't help but noodle, didn't help me. I am, however, starting to get into a lot of fusion artists, like Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, Soft Machine, and stuff like that. I'm not good at it, though.

14. The one thing that I am absolutely, unequivocally positive I do not want to do with my English major is become part of the publishing industry. Unfortunately, it seems like that's where every single English major at this school ends up going.

15. I have no use for spirituality or religion in any capacity. It is completely beyond my frame of reference and something I just cannot understand. Notions of "spirits" and "souls," astrology, all that stuff, bores me just as much as mainstream religion. However, I do make an exception for what I call "convenient coincidences," wherein something poignant or unexpected might happen, generally for the sole virtue of what could be its literary value later. For instance, a song that plays that happens to specifically refer to something that is happening in your life.

16. Lately, I've become interested in the kinds of things people write in suicide notes, by virtue of how extreme (or extremely reserved) they happen to be. I read a book about literary figures who committed suicide, and personally I think the best suicide note I've ever read was from Vachel Lindsay.

17. Of all the mediums I gorge myself with on a daily basis, television is one in which I've never gotten around to devising my own particular canon. I simply haven't watched "The Wire," "The Shield," "Mad Love," "Battlestar Galactica," or any of the other stuff people talk about. I saw one episode of "The Sopranos," and I liked it, but I haven't ever had an urge to watch it in its entirety.

18.I've found myself in the unique position of defending Israel lately. In high school, I would often find myself arguing (particularly with my mother) the legitimacy of the Palestinian cause and the two-state solution. Nowadays, I find myself arguing with ultra-leftists friends who feel suicide bombing is a legit method of fighting for freedom and that Hamas' cause is righteous. My general feeling is that there is nothing about Hamas or Hezbollah that suggests that they would like to do anything other than enforce theocracy on others.

19. It is said that there are five stages of grief. I believe I have only one, anger, and I skip all the others. Of course, that means I am simply pissed off most of the time. Most people notice this.

20. Since I was very young, I've been in the habit of reading several books at once. This is still the case. Most of the time I have five or six books I am reading at any one time, mainly non-fiction, but I like to switch it up.

21. Whenever I'm nervous, I will often whistle the opening bass line of A Tribe Called Quest's "Excursions." This happens particularly when I run into people or situations that I know may be awkward. Chances are, if I happen to be whistling that tune, I don't want to talk with or be around you.

22. I'm absolutely terrible with money. Since getting my apartment, paying bills is a chore that I forget about a lot. I am often afraid to look at my bank balance for fear it is low. This is one thing about being Jewish that I never picked up on.

23. The movie I have probably seen more times than any other is "Touch Of Evil." A few years ago I would often just put on the opening 4-minute tracking shot because it was so exciting to watch, but I've seen the entirety of it more than 20 times. It has so many enjoyable aspects, mainly the novelty of Charlton Heston as Mexicon narc agent but also the weird camera angles and of course Orson Welles, a man whose voice is so beautiful, I would listen to him talk about anything.

24. The cat the I currently live alone with has a bunch of different names. Carlson calls him Beans, which I think is a sucky name, so I decided to give him several different aliases. To date, these include: Cat, Dawg, Veto 2.0, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Willis, Wallace, Oswald, DJ Oswald, and Steak.

25. The Youtube video I watch more than any other is this one:

My Top Ten of '08 (for The Cornellian)

Though 2008 saw the release of several high-profile and heavily hyped new albums from the likes of Fleet Foxes, No Age, and Vampire Weekend, it occurred to me as I was compiling this list that the majority of my favorite albums from 2008 were made by veterans of all sorts of fringe music scenes from the past 20 years. It was a good year, I think, for comebacks, although their aesthetic success in my mind doesn’t necessarily match up to the sort of critical and commercial success I think should be bestowed on these ten albums. I call 2008 the year of the rock vets resharpening their tools and making sounds that seem to transcend both what they were capable of in the past as well as the majority of popular sounds in this past year. Unfortunately, Axl Rose is not among them.

10. Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks, Real Emotional Trash. Malkmus’ former band, Pavement, had a slight predilection towards lengthy jamming onstage, but they were diplomatic enough of a band most of the time to always make pop songcraft their primary focus (which is why the rock journalist tag of Pavement being the “indie Grateful Dead” never really stuck). Since then, Malkmus has forged a decent enough solo career that has veered increasingly into aimless but often wonderful noodling. Real Emotional Trash is the apotheosis of Malkmus’ gift as an improviser, which is partly why I wasn’t very impressed with the album the first few times I heard it, being predisposed towards ignoring the songs. As far as these things go, Real Emotional Trash is extremely listenable and tuneful, and has a good half-dozen or so incredible guitar solos from Malkmus himself. I don’t believe, after this album, that anyone can argue that Malkmus isn’t one of the key guitarists of this or any era.

9. The Magnetic Fields, Distortion. This is another album I didn’t really like at first, but subsequent listens have proved to me how wrong I was, initially. While I’m not a hardcore Magnetic Fields fan and I’m not one of those people that listens to the entirety of 69 Love Songs on a regular basis, this album struck me for several reasons. First, and most importantly, as is suggested in the title, this is a very distorted album with a lovely sort of fuzz pallor. Yet it’s a very simple sort of distortion, not heavily processed like you find on lots of hard rock albums, but more of a less abrasive, more fuzzy sort of distortion. The album is most directly comparable to the Jesus and Mary Chain, and several of the songs here are perhaps even better. “California Girls” and “Too Drunk To Dream” are just two songs that make it clear that when Stephin Merritt feels like it, he can produces dozens of good songs in a very short period of time.

8. Nine Inch Nails, The Slip. No one realizes this, but Trent Reznor keeps making albums that are better in almost every way than Nine Inch Nails during their mid-90s heyday. I believe that, partially inspired by Radiohead’s model for making music with In Rainbows, Reznor was inspired to make the kind of music he wanted to make, which in this album results in probably the most abrasive and most metal-oriented album to date. Unlike many notorious pop perfectionists, Reznor’s music is capable of sounding airy and unpolished, and is all the better for it. The best thing about this album, though, was the price: nobly, Reznor decided to put the album for free online as Radiohead did. The results were far less successful, which is a shame, because we need to support artists like Reznor. I never thought I’d say that.

7. Portishead, Third. The last Portishead album to be released was their self-titled album, in 1997. Since then, main instrumentalist and producer Geoff Barrow became horrified to find that Portishead’s debut album Dummy, once considered the paragon of the musical sub-genre known as trip-hop, had become an easy listening standard that people would play in massage parlors. At the same time, he became witness to a British club scene that had become sanitized and robbed of most of its vitality. When Third came out, no one was sure whether or not Portishead would fall on its face using the same tropes it did a decade earlier. No worries, though: Portishead managed to retool their sound while keeping the spy movie theatrics and adding a heavy industrial beat to awesomely intense songs like “Machine Gun.” Of course, that’s not the only trick they utilize, and as a songwriter and singer, Beth Gibbons continues to get better. This album also has one of the best ukulele interludes I have ever heard.

6. Jay Reatard, Matador Singles ’08. I’m not sure that this counts as an album proper, but it’s probably too good to not mention. Jay Reatard, real name Jay Lindsay, is another sort of post-punk renaissance man who has involved himself with all sorts of different garage and punk groups; his recent solo album Blood Visions was so good that I wasn’t sure how he would be able to top the level of quality of that album’s noisy and devilishly vulgar garage revivals. The new collection of singles, which were released over the last couple years on Matador Records, shows a slightly more composed and reflective Jay Reatard, even if that isn’t really saying much. Many of the songs don’t really rock at all, but stand out as incredibly moving and provocative (and certainly well-sung) pop songs. I’m not sure that this is the direction I would like to see Reatard go in in the future, but these singles make a nice detour and they are almost uniformly of high quality.

5. Q-Tip, The Renaissance. Q-Tip’s first album in nine years is appropriately titled: most of us were aware of his verbal dexterity, but he has also blossomed into an excellent producer during those years, and on The Renaissance, every song is produced by Q-Tip, save for one track, “Move,” which was produced by the late J. Dilla. Unfortunately, the rap music industry is particularly uninterested in its veteran players, no matter how vital they may still be, so The Renaissance didn’t get nearly the play it should have. That is a shame, because the album is almost completely excellent from beginning to end, and it does so partially by defying our expectations about rap music as well as what we expect from Q-Tip. For instance, a song like “Life is Better,” which has Norah Jones singing the hook, seems at first to be one of those saccharine “I’ll Be There For You”-sort of love songs. Instead, the hook leads into one long verse from Q-Tip where he discusses his influences as a rap artist as well as paying homage to a new breed of rappers. Similarly, a song like “Gettin’ Up” sounds at first like a sex goof, but then it becomes a somewhat moving and powerful meditation on the spiritual goodwill that can result from sex and intimacy. The production is uniformly great and Q-Tip’s voice is one of the most pleasurable things to listen to, no matter what he’s saying. And just prematurely: don’t accuse me of tokenism. If there were more decent rap albums I liked, I’d put them here.

4. TV On The Radio, Dear Science. Having now become the leading lights on the New York scene, I wasn’t sure what could be expected from TV On The Radio anymore. Dear Science was the band’s opportunity to show the country that they were now officially one of the great album bands of their era, and I believe they succeeded with perhaps their best album to date. The usual production tricks—loud, booming polyrhythms that utilize acoustic and electric drums simultaneously, non-descript background ambient noises, heavily processed guitar effects—are all there, but there seems to be a degree more of instrumental interplay between the members of the band. Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone trade off singing songs like Strummer and Jones, and in songs like “Dancing Choose” and “Shout Me Out,” you see a band chipping away at the foundations of their own song structures, creating mutated, dilapidated sound-creatures on a conducive yet organic assembly line.

3. Marnie Stern, This is It… An unlikely success story by any standard, Marnie Stern has managed to make an album that is simultaneously more harmonically expressive than most of her math/noise peers as well as more tuneful and interesting than most indie-pop albums. Stern is also, of course, an amazing guitarist, and one of the few that still manages to do anything interesting with fret-tapping techniques. However, the guitar theatrics are never merely theatrical, and in fact create a sort of hypnotic tape-loop effect that characterizes her songs as slightly off-kilter if at the same time surprisingly pleasant to listen to. Stern’s voice is an acquired taste, but I think I’ve got it by now, even if her lyrics for the most part aren’t the most coherent part of her act. Nevertheless, Marnie Stern represents the future: a fusion of mathy guitars and pleasant melodies.

2. Fucked Up, The Chemistry of Common Life. A Canadian hardcore punk band with an unfortunate name, Fucked Up basically surprised everyone with their unconventional method of piling on guitar overdubs for The Chemistry of Common Life. Ostensibly a hardcore album with a suitably abrasive lead vocalist who calls himself Pink Eye, it’s a piece of music covered with layers of sound, a style utilized by My Bloody Valentine but in this context can be compared more accurately to Smashing Pumpkins. It’s also rare among hardcore albums for several other reasons: it starts with a long flute solo, for instance, and the lyrics often deal with themes of religious alienation and spiritual longing, which are hardly the most apropos of hardcore subject matters. The larger point, however, is that the music present is heavy and thick with overdubs but also uniformly good, and listening to the entire thing at a loud volume (especially "Black Albino Bones") is an almost unreasonably cathartic experience. Some hardcore kids might not like the direction Fucked Up is going in, but it’s the perfect type of music for someone like me, I guess.

1. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! If there was a fear that Nick Cave was putting his renaissance man image in jeopardy by spreading himself too thin (not only writing and performing music but also publishing two novels and having a screenplay filmed), those fears were quickly put to rest by Cave’s side project Grinderman, which involved only the core members of the Bad Seeds and put made Cave relevant again. Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! Is his first album back with the Bad Seeds after the Grinderman project, but it’s encouraging to see that he’s kept much of the Grinderman spirit alive, transposing it to songs with slightly more expansive orchestration but are still, at their very core, gritty, dirty rock songs. It is, to my mind, the best album of 2008: an almost unparalleled aural experience that pays tribute to its twin totem roots of American blues music and the experimental path initially forged by the Velvet Underground, whose songs are heavily referenced throughout the album.

I like to think that the albums I love most are the ones that I judge on a most micro level, where I can recall with fondness not only specific songs but also specific parts of songs that blew my mind when I first heard them and caused me to repeat them endlessly. Here is a short list of some of those moments: Cave’s keyboard solo right after the break towards the end of “Today’s Lesson,” a noise so simultaneously cacophonous and tinny that it’s almost reveling in its “Nuggets”-like splendor; the incomparably sexy (there’s no other word to use, really) drumming in the post-apocalyptic composition “Moonland”; The part in “Albert Goes West” when Cave joins the chorus of “sha-la-la” vocals, which is followed by two mind-busting tom beats; The lyrics for “We Call Upon the Author,” which to my knowledge is the greatest song ever written about literary criticism (with the line, “Prolix! Prolix!/Another pair of scissors you can’t fix” becoming an anthem for the ages); the beginning of “Midnight Man,” which manages over a reciprocal bass line to make a noise approximating an orchestra warming up utilizing just a guitar and keyboard. However, I think the best song, and one of the best songs on the year, is “Lie Down Here (And Be My Girl),” a distillation of all the themes we expect from the new Nick Cave, now an aging, sexually-frustrated lothario who is also extremely self-aware about such matters. It’s an incomparable hard rock composition, with an ascending keyboard line of an almost absurd simplicity, and it also allows the lead singer to vent the vapidity of his maleness. If nothing else, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! has the power to unite sexually and emotionally maladjusted boy-men of any race or creed.