Grinderman

Remix albums are often as ill-advised a career move for rock'n'roll bands as gold lamé suits and hair plugs, but Nick Cave was never one to shy away from a challenge or experimentation. Grinderman 2 RMX finds Cave seemingly content to leave the Bad Seeds behind and slide fully into the open shirt sleaze rock of his now-disbanded side-/pet-project, Grinderman, recruiting a cadre of famous musicians to tweak the band's second record and the results are, well, mixed. Among the highlights are Joshua Homme's extremely clever, minimalist, slow-burn syncopation of "Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man" ( "Mickey Bloody Mouse"), the danceability added to "Worm Tamer" in separate tries by A Place to Bury Strangers and UNKLE, and an unconventional, stripped-down take on "Palaces of Montezuma" by Cave's old cohort, Barry Adamson. Otherwise, the remixers have taken it upon themselves to interpret their task as "make louder," and while the disc is free of anything ear-bleedingly awful, everyone is afraid to fall on their faces, leaving a distressingly conventional and ultimately superfluous album. The strength of Cave and his crew's songs provide a good framework, but this album will likely appeal strictly to the die-hards.