Hear Me Out: ‘Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!’ is Nick Cave’s most overlooked album


(Credits: Far Out / ANTI / Press)
Trust Nick Cave, a man who has depicted murder, mayhem and rage in his music with a demented, almost puckish glee, to find a man being brought back to life disturbing. Not just any man, either. In a post on his official website announcing his 14th record with the Bad Seeds, Cave wrote about hearing the story of Lazarus as a child in church. He was “disturbed and worried by it,” Cave began. “Traumatised, actually. We are all, of course, in awe of the greatest of Christ’s miracles—raising a man from the dead—but I couldn’t help but wonder how Lazarus felt about it.”
Which has always been Cave’s secret weapon. No matter how lurid and ghoulish his records in the Bad Seeds got, there was always a sense of empathy. One that elevated his intense storytelling to more than simple shock factor. Case in point, it wasn’t simply that the protagonist of ‘The Mercy Seat’ was facing execution and scared to die; it was that his fear had built to the point where he couldn’t remember whether he’d committed the crime he was accused of or not.
It’s the kind of wrinkle that turns a lyric to a pop song into something a short story could be based around, and it’s that master craftsman’s skill that is all over the record that experience in church inspired, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!. It’s a record that I believe is one of the absolute high points of Nasty Nick’s staggering back catalogue, yet one that doesn’t get anything resembling the recognition it deserves.
To be clear, this isn’t to say people think it’s bad. Despite making music for longer than Lin Manuel Miranda’s been alive, Cave hasn’t put his name to an outright rubbish album. However, the sheer novelist’s eye for detail in Cave’s storytelling in …Lazarus that marks it a cut above even his standards. Case in point, the riveting closer ‘More News From Nowhere’.
It’s The Odyssey meets After Hours, a bar crawl turning more surreal and unsettling with each drink, as Cave unfurls some of the most striking and memorable imagery of his entire career. “I go down a corridor and I see this guy / He must be about one hundred foot tall and he only has one eye / He asks me for my autograph I write nobody and then / I wrap myself up in my woolly coat and I blind him with my pen.”
There are similarly quotable lines everywhere on the record, making it a genuine lyrical highpoint in his career. One hell of a bar to clear, I’m sure you’ll agree. However, not only is …Lazarus a lyrical triumph, for the first time in Cave’s career, the record is fun. Really fun. More fun than several barrels full of particularly whimsical monkeys. Each track pings with the kind of energy that can make an unsuspecting listener realise they’re strutting down the street halfway into the magnificent sleaze of the opening title track.
It’s an energy that keeps up with the second track, ‘Today’s Lesson’, a reminder that the Bad Seeds could make a brilliant power-pop record if they put their mind to it. As it is, they’d just have to settle for making a better garage rock record than they ever made with Grinderman. That’s the heart of the record going forward, a perfect synthesis between Cave the storyteller, Cave the songwriter and the Bad Seeds.
They’ve never sounded more cohesive, with each of them playing off each other and raising utter hell while they do. Cave stuttering about ‘Myxomatoid kids’ over the Nuggets-indebted stomp of the darkly hilarious ‘We Call Upon The Author’. ‘Hold On To Yourself’, and it’s gothic Highway 61-isms. So, with all this fun to be had, why is it still an overlooked gem
Well, putting aside the fact that the record can be slightly one note in all the raunchy, 1960s-indebted fun it has, I’d say it’s the fact that the band themselves changed beyond recognition immediately afterwards. Pretty much the moment the tour for …Lazarus concluded, Cave and the Seeds became something very different. They rose from being a huge cult band to a huge band period. Graduating from theatres and concert halls to arena slaying, festival headlining elder statesmen of rock.
This has been reflected in the music, too, where the guitar-led freakouts of old have been replaced with piano, synth, and choir-led dervishes whose raucous swirl can fill any enormodome. On a songwriting level, Cave is barely recognisable as the Nick of old. For reasons perfectly understandable, his work has been lyrically vulnerable and intense, musically progressive and impressionistic, where arguably, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! is the band’s most accessible work.
Of course, I don’t begrudge them any of this. Cave lives the dream, making precisely the music he wants to make, and is enjoying a commercial and critical purple patch as a result. God knows he deserves to enjoy that more than anyone else. However, that doesn’t mean that I won’t stop banging the drum for a record that I think is among their finest moments.
Thank Christ he got rid of the moustache, though.
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