"Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!" (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds)
Cribbed from Allmusic:
What it all comes down to is that Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! is a Bad Seeds record that ups the ante once again. The elegance and poetry, the drama and tension of Cave's more poetic notions are balanced by his Sade-ian humor and social criticisms and his willingness to blend flesh and spirit as two sides of the same coin. Along with this comes a band's sound that is incredibly evolved and unself-conscious. It's an album where a fire breathing, rootsy, garage rock band creates a soundtrack to modern fun house life: where the stakes are high, the odds are hopelessly stacked, and there is little left to do but laugh at its dreadful irony.
[From allmusic ((( Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! > Review )))]
Many, many more reviews, mostly positive, of the album at Metacritic if my word isn't enough.
such as Pitchfork playing up Nick Cave's love of the old, weird America…
[Nick Cave] always been interested in the darker corners of Americana, especially the Southern mythologies that informed early albums like From Her to Eternity and The Firstborn Is Dead, and Cave makes this collection an old-fashioned picaresque through exurban shopping malls, shuttered factories, and dilapidated ranches-- complete with Biblical overtones (and what's a Nick Cave album without those?). The opening title track, with its fierce strut and taunting floor-tom tattoo, opens on Lazarus newly resurrected, a fame junkie traipsing westward before ending up "back in the streets of New York, in a soup queue, a dope fiend, a slave." Cave spins the yarn not as a fire-and-brimstone sermon, but more like a sardonic Sunday school lesson-- and pretty funny to boot.
Even the writers Cave namedrops are almost exclusively Americans: Ernest Hemingway, Charles Bukowski, and John Berryman, whom Cave, like the Hold Steady and Okkervil River, extols beyond all others. To his considerable credit, Cave may be the only rock musician who convincingly doubles as a literary critic. Such pretensions are built into his persona and tempered with his awareness that rock and roll is ultimately low-brow and therefore a subversive vessel for high-bow concerns. In other words, he has a lot more to say about Lolita than Sting ever did. As on "There She Goes, My Beautiful World" on Abattoir Blues, Cave assails all things bookish on "We Call Upon the Author", a rip-roaring metafictional rocker that questions not only the need for suffering on Earth, but Cave's own fascination with it. Mingling lines like "myxamatoid kids spraddle the streets" with base puns like "I feel like a vacuum cleaner, a complete sucker," Cave implies the author in question might be himself or it might be God, which makes the song-ending shout all the ballsier: "Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!"
When Cave isn't editing the Bible, he's moving Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! westward-- the trajectory of so many American stories-- through the heartland and into the Southwest, through the hilariously iniquitous "Today's Lesson" and into "Albert Goes West", set in the "vast, indifferent deserts of Arizona." As always, it's a strange road trip, with Cave keeping the car between the lines while Ellis messes with the radio. Their collaboration has intensified over the fourteen years since the violinist joined the band for Henry's Dream, and Ellis has obviously called shotgun on Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! His strange noises color every track: the sinister wind-up music box sounds on "Today's Lesson", the gentle flute solo on the surprisingly tender "Jesus of the Moon", the delicate violin wheeze behind "Night of the Lotus Eaters". All of Cave's albums aim to unsettle, but rarely have he and the Bad Seeds managed to do it so efficiently, so gracefully, or so forcefully. It all culminates in the haunted closer "More News from Nowhere", on which Cave does Homer doing Dylan to sum up what sounds like his whole career. Ellis fiddles while America burns, and Cave sings, almost sweetly, "It's strange in here. Yeah, it gets stranger every year." Amen to that.
[From Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!: Pitchfork Record Review]
Oh, and the CD comes with a 54 page booklet, which is mostly lyrics, set in the sort of layout that lets you know Cave wants you to actually read the words too. This isn't a cramped, tiny font, but expanded, with punctuation, spacing, like those self-published books of poetry you used to see everywhere before the internet revolution.
