The arrival yesterday of a remix of “Heathen Child”, with added Robert Fripp, reminded me that I’d somehow neglected to write anything about “Grinderman 2”, even with Nick Cave on the cover of the current Uncut. These past few months, I’ve actually had some fairly fluctuating responses to Cave’s records: a bunch of reissues of albums I’d long loved sounded oddly unsatisfying, and what you could pejoratively term the panto aspect of Cave’s schtick (and, actually, his attitudes, however 'literary', to women) seemed harder than usual to ignore. Something similar happened the first time I listened to this second album by the Grinderman project. Two things happened, though. One: an awareness that Cave’s music, more than most at the moment, appears to be vulnerable to my moods. And two: an understanding, repeatedly drilled into us, that Grinderman are a band that just happen to feature Nick Cave, rather than a Nick Cave project. It’s a delicate nuance, but in that context “Grinderman 2” starts sounding rather differently; as, perhaps, a terrific new project from the guy from The Dirty Three. Consequently, it’s Warren Ellis who starts to dominate these nine immensely rackety and entertaining songs. Cave told David Quantick in the Uncut interview that “Half the time we don’t know what they [the sounds] are,” but it’s likely that a fair few of them are generated by Ellis’ electric bouzouki, a weapon of considerable aggression and potential for distortion. Presumably, it’s that which makes the noise loosely comparable to Ron Asheton wrestling a Hoover on “Heathen Child”. Cave is plenty audible here, backed as he is by a great Martyn Casey bassline and the blokey call-and-response harmonies of his bandmates (on “Palaces Of Montezuma”, incidentally, they attain an elevated sort of rugby club soulfulness). Often, though, he uncharacteristically sinks into the mix, as if the democracy-in-action spirit of Grinderman is being muscularly asserted over the mixing desk. When he’s foregrounded on “Palaces Of Montezuma”, a grand, droll and verbose rumination on the dimensions of love that’d fit neatly on the last couple of Bad Seeds albums, it’s quite a shock. That said, “Palaces Of Montezuma” is the not the only song to recall The Bad Seeds. “Grinderman 2” is a substantially more wide-ranging effort than its predecessor. At its centre sits a looming marvel called “When My Baby Comes”, which has a similar fluttering anxiety, as Ellis’ violin loops and loops, to “Moonland” on “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!” (Just checked the title of “Moonland”, incidentally, and noticed that its songwriting credit is Cave/Ellis/Casey/Sclavunos – Grinderman, in other words). About halfway through, “When My Baby Comes” explodes into a cycle of bigger and bigger riffs. Quoting Cave again from the Uncut interview, he says, “Jason Spaceman came into the studio and we played him ‘Worm Tamer’. He Said, ‘Are you guys aware of just how fucked up this sounds?’” Spaceman had a point about the excellent “Worm Tamer” (Bo Diddley beat, wave after wave of noise, sexually-charged reference to the Loch Ness Monster). If he’d been commenting on “When My Baby Comes”, however, he’d perhaps be less disconcerted: that long passage of crescendos is not a million miles away from the sound of peak Spiritualized. And while “Evil” is a fervid throwback to the first Grinderman album, “What I Know” is something else again: parched and vulnerable near-ambience which again emphasises the ambitions of Warren Ellis in the post-Mick Harvey era, evidently keen on using the studio as an instrument rather than relying on the unsullied sounds of these very bad men and their instruments. Finally, there’s “Bellringer Blues”, conceivably the best track on “Grinderman 2”, which begins with a flare of backwards psych, and maintains a reverse Ellis riff throughout, over an intensely groovy organ vamp. Grinderman are currently playing an interesting game with their own reputations – the daft dressing-up game of the “Heathen Child” clip being a case in point – but on “Bellringer Blues”, the brilliance of the band really comes to the fore: the incipient menace doesn’t come from Cave, but from the trippy, claustrophobic funk conjured up by his accomplices.

Ok, first things first, there’s some spoilers ahead. So, unless you’re one of the three people left on the planet who’s not read Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s sequence of books on which these movies are based, you might want to turn away now. One of the most contested roles in Hollywood right now is Lisbeth Salander, the Gothy, tattooed computer hacker at the centre of Larsson’s books. Troubled, harassed and vengeful, she’s the natural successor to The Terminator’s Sarah Connor, Ripley from the Alien films and The Bride in Kill Bill. To any actress, she’s the kind of hefty female character that, sadly, doesn’t come around very often in movies. So, if your name is Carey Mulligan, Ellen Page, Kristen Stewart or even Emma Watson, chances are you have already started beating a path to the door of David Fincher, who’s signed to direct the American remake. For now, though, there is Noomi Rapace, who plays Lisbeth in all three of the original Swedish movies. Rapace, who looks like a cross between Tamsin Grieg and Justine Frischmann, is electrifying in both The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and its sequel, The Girl Who Played With Fire. She brings a strong, wounded dignity to Lisbeth, shifting convincingly between sullen, feral and vulnerable. The pairing of Rapace with hangdog Michael Nyqvist, as investigative magazine publisher Mikael Blomkvist, made for a great visual odd couple in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. That Daniel Craig is slated to play Blomkvist in Fincher’s film perhaps signals a shift towards a more glamorous, Hollywoodised central pairing. The Girl Who Played With Fire opens a year after The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and picks up several outstanding plot threads. There’s the small matter, for instance, of Lisbeth’s abusive guardian Nils Bjurman. Bjurman raped Lisbeth several times during the first film; she retaliated by secretly filming one encounter and then tattooing across his chest the words, I AM A SADISTIC PIG A PERVERT AND A RAPIST. As The Girl Who Played With Fire opens, Bjurman wants Lisbeth’s film back, and employs some nasty dudes to find it. Meanwhile, Blomkvist has just taken on a new freelancer who is working on an expose of sex trafficking that will incriminate a number of high-ranking officials. These two storylines converge in a way that feels, eventually, contrived; though the circuitous route they take on their way there, and the incidental plot additions, twists and auxiliary characters that come and go give the feeling of plot heft. Larssen himself is pretty guilty of plundering many genre tropes and plot staples. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, after all, concerned itself with Nazis, corruption, incest and serial murder; surely, we're been here before? At least, I guess, The Girl Who Played With Fire tries to find wriggle-room within its pulp conventions, and the film's grand conspiracy turns out to lead in an unexpected direction. Astonishingly, for this he seems to draw on Star Wars, and particularly the third act revelations in The Empire Strikes Back. But these serve less as resolutions, more as a way of setting up the third film, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest. Really, one thing The Girl Who Played With Fire lacks is a self-contained narrative arc; something to give the film its own satisfactory ending. It’s also a pretty grim film. However strong and empowered a character Lisbeth is, there’s part of me that feels uncomfortable with the way she’s treated in both these films. The degrees of abuse she undergoes, particularly, remind me in places of the Seventies horror exploitation cycle. In the final act, she’s buried alive outside a backwoods compound by a deformed maniac and his monstrous henchman. Axes are involved. You might call it the Swedish Chainsaw Massacre, it so closely resembles the kind of tortures meted out by Leatherface to poor Sally in Tobe Hooper’s movie. Incoming director Daniel Alfredson (whose brother Tomas directed Let The Right One In) maintains the look of the first film; a muted colour palette prevails (one, now I think about it, that’s pretty suited to David Fincher, who likes a bit of murk). Certainly, some of the freshness and originality of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is absent here. It’s true, too, by keeping Lisbeth and Blomkvist separate for nearly the entire film, Alfredson deprives us of the dynamic between the two that worked so well in the first film. There’s an unambitious efficiency, too, to the film. It feels like a TV film, and while at its heart these books are largely police procedurals, they lack the qualities of, say, Prime Suspect. The Girl Who Played With Fire opens in the UK on August 27

As yesterday’s playlist indicated, the Avey Tare solo album has arrived, and I’ll do my best to write something about it in the next day or two. In the meantime, though, those of you attracted to the wilder shores of the Animal Collective might be interested in this one, the latest effort by a shadowy but productive band from Finland called Kemialliset Ystävät (“Chemical Friends”, I am informed). Kemialliset Ystävät, if you’ve never come across them before, are part of a pretty lively Finnish psych scene, which I always mean to dig into in earnest. I have one or two Avarus and Kiila albums, but the vast expanses of Kemialliset’s discography – 40-odd strong, I believe - remain largely beyond me, unfortunately: maybe one of you could give us some clues as to where to start properly? Anyhow, the beautifully-packaged “Ullakkopalo” is great, being a crotchety forest jam, all rustle and sprung rattle, which harbours some of the same kindergarten freakout sensibilities of the Animal Collective’s earlier work, albeit pushed much, much further out. Like AC, there’s a certain whimsical infantilism here that might jar with some listeners. But the way Kemialliset Ystävät’s hypnotic little melodies (“Ystävälliset Miekat” being a great case in point) emerge from the improvised thicket, and the way everything is played, notwithstanding the density, with such brightness and clarity, is really genuinely charming. Other things that come to mind when listening to the frictional chaos of “Ullakkopalo” are Kraut commune jams like Amon Duul, plus some of the most untethered outriders of the free folk scene, notably Matt Valentine and co’s Tower Recordings, whose impressionistic, collagist way of grafting disparate snippets of sound together is a decent analogue. Much of Kemialliset Ystävät’s pipes, strums, squeaks and glitches sounds like it was processed through a laptop, while retaining its organic vibes. As the album goes on, though, some skinny but intense fuzz guitar soloing cuts a swathe through the found-sound rituals. On “Maksaruohoja” or “Mestari Ei Väsy”, to take two, the thought occurs that there are some similarities to the playful, uncanny tapestry of last year’s Broadcast And The Focus Group album – if, that is, the collective had expanded to include guest spots from Ben Chasny.

In spite of being a big fan of the last couple of Arbouretum albums – and also happily aware of Dave Heumann’s jobbing work in the past with Will Oldham and so on – I’ve been inexplicably useless at checking out one or two of his sidelines. Notably, that is, the band Human Bell he steers with one of the guys from Lungfish (not Daniel Higgs, I should say). I’m not, however, sleeping on Heumann’s latest project, The Coil Sea; a pretty free-flowing jamming unit set up with a bunch of other Baltimore musicians in the wake of Arbouretum’s 2009 tour. A satisfyingly meandering four-tracker, “The Coil Sea” begins in the vicinity of where Arbouretum left off. “Abyssinia” is serpentine, torpid psych with Heumann providing frictional improvisations over a staunch Crazy Horse plod. From thereon in, though, things get distinctly looser, and while the formal, folkish songwriting style of Arbouretum disappears, Heumann’s impressive grasp of technique and atmosphere remains. “Dolphins In The Coil Sea” – at 11 and a half minutes, the longest jam here by a nose – was conceived as a “homage” to Sonny Sharrock, signposted by the clarion call of Heumann’s first riff. If there’s a more contemporary reference for the gripping, jazzy exploration that follows, though, it’s probably Nels Cline, who definitely shares a fondness for a certain high-end, needling freestyling. It’s a terrific display of invention, virtuosity and stamina, made even better by the way Heumann’s ad hoc bandmates (especially Michael Lowry and/or Michael Kuhl, the drummers on the sessions) track him so artfully. If, on Arbouretum’s “Song Of The Pearl”, there was an occasional feel of Television, “Revert To Dirt” feels more like something from a Tom Verlaine solo album (perhaps something from that instrumental one from a few years back? It’s been a good while since I played it, so apologies if I’m off the mark). Finally, it rolls into “Waking The Naga”, with the pace picking up into some blocky, almost martial “lange gerade”. Another firm foundation for Heumann’s explorations, at once languid and intense, liberated and yet unfailingly precise in their tone and clarity.