Here’s another vinyl edition of summer jams for your listening pleasure. This week, it’s all about rejection. Songs about the big, fat NO and the feeling of a trapdoor opening up beneath your feet. Now, normally I’d have two releases to feature for my jams, but in the last week, there’s literally only been one thing that I’ve been listening to, and that’s Grinderman:
Grinderman is a project from Nick Cave that started during the time of his 2006 “solo” tours, featuring songs he’d begun to write on guitar instead of piano. His simpler guitar style gives this project’s songs a very raw feel. This 7″ was released as the second single off Grinderman’s 2007 self-titled album for the track, No Pussy Blues. It’s as straightforward as the title suggests, a banger about not getting any. The song rises and falls with the swelling frustration the narrator endures while trying to woo a woman and the lyrics are absolutely deadpan in their delivery, making the journey as humorous as a song can get without sacrificing on quality: “I read her Eliot, I read her Yeats, I tried my best to stay up late, I fixed the hinges on her gate, but still she said she didn’t want to. Damn!” The B-side to this release is a track called Chain Of Flowers. It’s a much softer track that’s a bittersweet mulling over what it’s like to wait for someone who isn’t quite ready. I’m just breaking the ice with Grinderman and Nick Cave’s work as a whole, but this track gives me great hope for the rest of his catalog.
