I test drove the new Grinderman album over the weekend on a roundtrip roadtrip between Austin and Houston. Listening to a CD while driving down long stretches of highway is my favorite way to get to know a fresh chunk of music. Grinderman 2 is epic and intimate, a roiling, raging, rock and roll masterpiece. Nick Cave’s lyrics twined with Warren Ellis’s feral guitar is a rope of flame dangling over a pit of white hot Devil cum. This is some fucking seriously beautiful torment.

Listening to Cave’s romantic wail at dusk, the Texas sky black and blue, striated with the blood orange of a sinking sun, life seems like some sweet agony, every breath a birth, every breath a death. I ride through the hill country toward some unknown thing…and not knowing is the mystery that sparkplugs the engine that rules these infinite rolling hills. Between two places is where I’ve always been. I’m learning to be content in being nowhere.

When music makes me think musically, when it inspires me to create something approximating art, it’s done its job. Art is a contagion.

‘Palaces Of Montezuma’, a song I particularly admire from Grinderman 2, contains the following lines:

“The spinal cord of JFK
Wrapped in Marilyn Monroe’s negligee
I give to you
I want nothing in return
Just the softest little breathless word”

Many songwriters claim Rimbaud’s mantle, Cave nails it.