The idea of Nick Cave as a remix-appropriate diva is such an excellent one that you might wonder why his hideous shrieks and cadaverous croon haven't been pillaged by DJs a hundred times over. House music, at least, has always had a taste for mixing religious ecstasy into worldly grooves, even if house producers have tended to draw more from the uplifting end of the gospel spectrum. But there's also been a side of house that's reveled in sampling hellfire condemnations and apocalyptic oratory from folks who probably wouldn't set foot in the secular houses of sin where dance music lives. With his pulpit-rocking cadences and brimstone tone, Nick Cave would fit perfectly in this tradition, even if no one's had the sense (or lack thereof) to take him to that particular river just yet.
One look at the tracklist for Grinderman's 2 RMX, eleven tweaks on the band's second (and supposedly final) album, 2010's Grinderman 2, should tell you that this isn't that kind of a remix project. The dream of Nick Cave as hectoring house music queen will have to wait a little while longer. Grinderman was Cave's noisiest and most truculent project in years, but also his wittiest and most sensual. Especially on Grinderman 2, the band had perfected a sound that was equal parts dirty-minded groove, ear-scourging feedback, and mordant-past-all-normal-measure wordplay. If much of Cave's love of blues had focused on the genre's vein-opening confessional side, Grinderman found him returning to its other roots, as a soundtrack for drunken house parties and semi-legal gatherings in sweaty speakeasies. It was a glorious (if often brutal) and physical sound, real body-moving stuff, as well as a cerebral one.
And so while this swan-song compilation is unsurprisingly helmed by peers young and old, from the noisier and more aggressive end of rock music with a few beat-minded ringers thrown in, the assembled musicians don't often seem to get what made Grinderman great (or simply don't care). These are not, for the most part, radical reconstructions, but the best are often the most simple. Or the most sympathetic, however far afield they get from Grinderman's world. Robert Fripp's "Super Heathen Child" is exactly what the name implies, not doing much to the original except cranking it a few notches, including (naturally) the guitars, with the blues raunch being eaten away at by Frippertronics excess. It's one of the few tracks on 2 RMX that I'd listen to over one of Grinderman's non-remixed songs. Not only because it makes the original "Heathen Child" bigger and badder and more swaggering, but because it does so without getting in the way of that too-hot groove.
The individual entries on Grinderman 2 are all over the map quality-wise, from inert and utterly ignorable (Factory Floor's mush-headed clichés when they take on "spooky" industrial ambiance) to half-brilliant reframings of pretty singular material (UNKLE slamming acid house silliness into chunky surf-rock pastiche until they come up with the perverse idea of Grinderman-goes-big-beat). But these remixes are undeniably at their weakest when they dull the band's get-down-get-dirty instincts, defang their attack, and/or smother Cave's self-lacerating humor under a ton of "atmospheric" murk. And even the like-minded remixers occasionally fall short. Queens of the Stone Age aren't musically a million miles from what Grinderman were attempting to do during their too-short career, but Josh Homme's tepid "Mickey Bloody Mouse" is a damn shame when you consider the kind of motorik monster he could have pulled off.
Still, occasionally someone strays from the Grinderman template and actually scores. For a glimpse at what a wholly beautiful Grinderman might have sounded like, look to Barry Adamson, who tarts up the already pretty swoony "Palaces of Montezuma" with his usual Bacharach-gone-badass bells and whistles. And while I've never been much taken by A Place to Bury Strangers' empty cacophony, maybe all they needed all along was a great singer: There's no sex in their rhythm, another JAMC-in-a-tsunami attack that's been bleached of all blues, but it's definitely a groove, however manic and relentlessly forward-charging. Plus Cave's voice adds an urgency and human grit that's almost always been missing from the band's original material. It's a shame that more acts here, given the platform, didn't choose to exercise Adamson's craft or APTBS' intensity. As a farewell-cum-summation, 2 RMX could have been worse. It's hardly as cynical or cover-your-ears bad as most rock remix albums. If nothing else, it proves how singular Grinderman were, and reinforces how much they'll be missed.
