Jake Lane

Entertainment Editor

In a world where random association ruled mental processes, strange flights of the human mind would not shock and please in the ways that currently exist in the realm of entertainment. In other words, we probably would not have entertainment, as nothing could possibly surprise us.

Thankfully no such world exists, or at least we humans do not currently inhabit it. Thus, the new video from Nick Cave’s middle-aged creeper group Grinderman still rips at the bodices of the mind and makes the viewer alternately uncomfortably and eerily fascinated.

To begin, any fan of the Bad Seeds or the Birthday Party knows Cave is anything but an average rock legend: from his heroin-addled wild boy ‘80s era, in which both his hair and sense of the macabre dominated his records, through the more palatable ‘90s where love songs and “Murder Ballads” drew in a wider crowd of fans, Cave has been an iconoclast and elder statesman to younger generations of kickers and morbid lovers.

With “Grinderman” in 2007, Cave debuted a leering perverted uncle side, simultaneously bemoaning the indignities of aging and appearing hornier than ever, with a diminished form of his band of ruffians on backing duty. Last year, co-founding Seed Mick Harvey left the group and though a temporary replacement stood in on a cursory tour of Australia, no announcement of future plans has appeared from the Bad Seeds camp.

When Grinderman announced their sophomore album last month and the single “Heathen Child,” along with its cover illustration, observers could only speculate that things were getting weirder. The model, a dark-complected woman with bright orange hair and dripping chops, looked like a Vitamin C (remember her?) re-invented as a creole vampire. With their new video for the single, all assumptions of the strange seem to have been too modest.

As Cave and company dance before a backdrop of fireworks and the cosmos, a mousy-but-beautiful girl soaks in a barely opaque bathtub, tormented by a tangible Breek bust with bleeding eyes, not to mention apparitions of Bigfoot, a hockey-masked stalker with comically large ears, Cave as Krishna and three of the band members hoisting Kalishnikovs and firing at the camera. With the cover model as cheerleader, Cave chronicles these inner demons and proclaims the bathtub girl as a “heathen child.”

As music videos go, this one might be the best in an era of controversial faux-nudity and pelvic grinding that hop all around the issue of sexual desire and preoccupation, yet never portray it as a demon. While the video girl appears partially nude from the waist up with no editing in the way of motion blurs or stars, she is hardly sexualized: instead, we are to interpret her “demons” we see on the screen as symbolic of whatever “heathen” desires have but her in the bath, which consists of some milky fluid which probably isn’t average bath water.

The real appeal of the video, as with Cave’s entire catalogue, is that the man juggles the bizarre in such a way that it never fails to compel. Check out “Grinderman 2,” I know I will.

Also, a 12-inch single for “Heathen Child” comes out Aug. 30, featuring a remix with Crimson King Robert Fripp doing what he does best, reinforcing multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis’s primary assessment of the album: “like stoner rock meets Sly Stone via Amon Düül.”