With tasteful, often genteel, bands like Arcade Fire, Vampire Weekend and Dirty Projectors dominating the hipster nexus for the last couple years, it's no wonder that music fans with a hankering for the rough stuff were thrilled by a mean, hairy monster like Grinderman. Nick Cave — the grand old man of Baudelairean post-punk — hooked up some of his bros from his backing band the Bad Seeds, picked up a guitar, and used that axe to find a new way into primal emotions he'd been examining in various forms for decades. The over-the-top misogynistic bile of punk-blues bashers like "No Pussy Blues" and "I Don't Need You to Set Me Free" imagined the paunchy letch at the lonely end of the bar as a crazed, self-hating anti-hero, gleefully striking out more times in one happy hour than most losers do all night. It was Muddy Waters's Hard Again by way of Elvis Costello's This Year's Model, a return to form and a thuggin' indictment of romantic desire from the inside.

Cave could've tried to top Grinderman by sinking to new caveman lows. But Grinderman 2 has notes of wry contentment: "My baby calls me the… read more »