Recently, Nick Cave embarked on a round of interviews to promote his 14th studio album with the Bad Seeds. In one particularly entertaining profile, Cave revealed that he was petitioning to have a large statue of himself, clad in a loincloth and seated astride a rearing stallion, installed on a roundabout in his home town of Warracknabeal, in southern Australia. He then turned his attentions to his 1997 album The Boatman's Call, his beautiful, anguished eulogy for a failed relationship with fellow singer-songwriter Polly Harvey. He considered its merits in terms rather more redolent of his countryman Sir Les Patterson than you might expect from a man once commissioned to give a lecture on the art of the love song at the Vienna poetry festival. "I'd got dumped by some bird and here I was making some great statement," he reflected ruefully, "about some fucking sheila."
Then again, perhaps Cave can afford to playfully dismiss his back catalogue. A decade after The Boatman's Call was heralded as a kind of unsurpassable masterpiece, he can survey his career from a unique and enviable position. At 50, an age when most rock artists are either well down the slide to irrelevance or experiencing the kind of creative wobble that requires special pleading by die-hard fans to explain away - the age at which Paul McCartney released Off the Ground, Bob Dylan was favouring the world with Wiggle Wiggle and David Bowie was "doing" drum'n'bass and covering songs by Placebo - he finds himself producing his best work. His 2004 double album Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus was a triumph. Last year, Grinderman's eponymous debut depicted itself as a jokey side-project - its cover bore a photograph of a monkey masturbating - but still contained more substance, wit and vitality than most of 2007's major releases combined.
The shadow of the Grinderman project hangs over Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! There are a couple of beautiful ballads on offer, notably Jesus of the Moon, but its default setting is churning garage rock, two- or three-note riffs, scourging bursts of feedback in place of guitar licks and Sister Ray-ish organ solos. The closing More News from Nowhere seems like a more genteel relation of Grinderman's No Pussy Blues. While the latter song found Cave vainly attempting to woo a young lady by sucking his gut in and quoting poetry, here he's confronted by distaff spectres from his past: the eponymous heroine of his 1985 single Deanna reappears, while fans of The Boatman's Call and its attendant sheila will be intrigued to find a "Miss Polly" among their number. He approaches them with suitably flowery entreaties, and gets the brush-off every time: "She ain't down with any of that, she's heard that shit before."
Cave has described the album as "a haemorrhaging of words and ideas", which in practice means that most of the lyrics are tantalisingly opaque. Nonetheless, you're never far from something strangely beautiful ("Mr Sandman, the inseminator, opens her up like a love letter and enters her dreams," offers Today's Lesson), or snortingly funny. He's particularly droll on the subject of sex. The protagonists of Albert Goes West head off for various geographical locations in the US, except one: "Henry he went south and lost his way down in the weeping forests of Le Vulva." We Call Upon the Author, meanwhile, deploys the words "myxomatoid", "jejune" and "prolix" - the latter repeatedly, in the chorus - has a swipe at the oeuvre of Charles Bukowski ("a jerk"), and lauds the Pulitzer prize-winning confessional poet John Berryman. It also - and let us here slip into the rocker vernacular with which Cave assessed The Boatman's Call - rocks like a bastard.
The Bad Seeds remain the most versatile and distinctive supporting cast imaginable, blessed with an ability to essay a baffling variety of musical styles while always sounding exactly like the Bad Seeds. Night of the Lotus Eaters not only offers the improbable image of towering, backwoodsman-bearded drummer Jim Sclavunos playing the finger cymbals - a kind of percussionist's equivalent of seeing Billy Bob Thornton riding a Fifi and the Flowertots trike - but also a perfect demonstration of their abilities. It's essentially a three-note loop repeated for five minutes - not much to go on, but they layer it with drifting feedback, rattling congas and unexpected bursts of clattering drums. The end result is somehow simultaneously beatific and twitchily neurotic, utterly in tune with Cave's lyrics, a troubled exploration of the satiating effects of success and fame.
At moments like that, it would be tempting to call Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! exemplary. But that makes it sound stuffy and didactic, which it isn't at all. It's hilarious, chilling and exhilarating: further evidence of the unique and enviable position Cave finds himself in at 50.
