Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!
Mute, out tomorrow
FOUR STARS

Robyn
Koko, London
THREE STARS


Nick Cave is a 50-year-old man with long, thinning, boot-polish hair, a joke-shop moustache, and a weakness for shirt collars with the wingspan of a small plane. He could easily be a laughing stock. Instead, he’s about as cool as a 50-year-old man can be.

In Cave’s corner of rock’n’roll, where the rules were largely drawn up by Iggy Pop, a willingness to look silly is a vital qualification. And the sense of the ridiculous that he brings to his wardrobe also comes bubbling out of his music.

If you think he has overdone the exclamation marks by calling this album Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, wait till you see the lyric booklet, which is like a series of emails from an excited little girl. Cave gets away with it because he’s having so much fun.

It’s a garage-rock album, driven by dirty riffs and gleeful scorn, but Cave’s garage is a sophisticated place. The title track, halfway from a lecture to a football chant, tackles not just Lazarus but Harry Houdini (‘the second greatest escapologist,’ Cave says, ‘the greatest being Lazarus’) and Cave’s own memories of 1970s New York.

The music is highly physical – boney rhythms, visceral choruses – while the lyrics veer between earthiness and elegance. Cave uses words like a poet, or at least like a lifelong fan of Leonard Cohen. His voice is heading that way too: deep, dark, self-aware, and making up for its limitations with perfect diction.

The best rock and pop is often bitter-sweet. Cave’s music has a similar quality – in the sphere of intelligence, rather than sugar. It shuttles blithely from biblical references to Ockerish bluntness. It’s clever-dumb.

Like his heroes, Cohen and Johnny Cash, Cave can be bleak. ‘Get ready to shoot yourself,’ he sings, ‘on the night of the lotus eaters’. But also like Cohen, he usually has some humour playing at the corner of his mouth. If you’ve never really got him, don’t worry: two songs here, strategically placed, are waiting to win you over.

Bang in the middle of the album, there’s We Call Upon The Author To Explain, which is a masterclass in making the listener laugh while still rocking like a Stooge. The chorus is irresistible and when Cave jauntily declaims, ‘Prolix, prolix / Nothing a pair of scissors won’t fix,’ he squirts new life into rock’s tired old rhyming dictionary.

At the end, just when you think he is running out of steam, he unfurls More News From Nowhere, which combines the crisp simplicity of a two-string chug with lyrics that amount to a sexual autobiography (possibly fictional). When the author meets a black girl who is dancing naked, he confides: ‘I spent the next seven years between her legs, a-pining for my wife’.

This is Cave’s 14th studio album with the Bad Seeds, never mind the side-projects. Only one of the previous 13 reached the UK top ten, but Lazarus could easily rise up and outsell the rest. It’s catchy, punchy, witty and raunchy: you can’t ask for much more.

Last week, the chart-pop scene was disheartening, with Brit Awards going to Mika, Take That, Kate Nash and an off-form Kylie. This week, things looked up with a short tour from Robyn, the Swedish bombshell who broke through in Britain with the summer dance anthem With Every Heartbeat.

At 29, Robyn has done it the hard way: this is her third tilt at fame, and she is now on her own label after falling out with the majors. On stage at Koko, she clearly has the right ingredients – a ton of energy, a dash of charisma, an expressive voice that struggles only when she tries to rap, and a memorable look –half Agyness Deyn, half Jennings and Darbyshire.

Her songs, dished up by three sidemen playing mostly electronic instruments, are refreshingly eclectic but frustratingly uneven. One minute she’s Soft Cell, the next she’s closer to Cher. With Every Heartbeat is unexpectedly leaden, until she plays it again, with less instrumentation and more feeling. But in Handle Me, Be Mine! and the next single Who’s That Girl – not the Eurythmics or Madonna song, although it resembles both – she has a string of winners. Pop will survive.