Nick Cave, the world's most beloved musical mortician, is back with The Bad Seeds and a brand new story to tell. Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! conveys the desperations of a slew of typical Cave characters—all with some ambivalent ties to the biblical Lazarus and his modern-day predicament. The album kicks off vigorously and slowly gets more brooding, with each track serving as a precursor to the next. Cave continuously rattles off some of his best prose on the basis of evasion, oppression, and resurrection. All this rests atop a limitless soundscape of scraping steel strings, screeching echoes and primal (but by no means primitive) rock 'n' roll. The instrumentation is top-notch, thanks to the dream team that is The Bad Seeds, who seem to use almost every instrument at their disposal. Yet with all that's going on, they still leave room for more—as if to say, “Strap on a guitar and jam with us, man!”

 

-Kyle Timlin