As musical Botox takes over the charts, ironing out the wrinkles in the classic back catalogues it so shamelessly steals from, here, at last, is an album so brimming and crackling with invention, violence, beauty, mystery, humour and malevolence that there is no option but to bow down before it and give praise. If Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus and Grinderman struck fans as almost too good, this late in the group’s life span, to be true, Dig!!! represents the final, irrefutable evidence that they may only now be truly coming to the boil. Musically, it’s astonishing: the Bad Seeds dig far, far down into the possibilities offered by instrumentation others merely make do with the rudiments of. Lyrically, Cave takes the breath away, his snarling declamations on sin, celebrity (the title track), sexual intimacy, ambiguity and corruption (Today’s Lesson), so up close, so unfiltered, you can almost feel his spittle on your neck. Hallelujah.

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