A few weeks, maybe months ago, someone left a note after one of my blogs with some insider knowledge about the next Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds LP. It was, they suggested, the most direct pop album that Cave had ever made: after the Stoogesy ramalams of Grinderman and the meditative western soundtracks, here, apparently, was the workaholic Cave at his most focused and dynamic. I’ve been living with “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!” for a while now, and in a way that gossip was right. But this is one of those curious records that initially appear immediate, but which only become genuinely compelling after multiple listens. It’s bony, dispassionate, far from the confessional intensity of, say, “The Boatman’s Call”, and, in spite of the title, with less religious brow-furrowing than usual. Two things stand out. One, it’s really funny. Two, it’s really groovy. If there’s a Cave album it reminds me of right now, it’s “Let Love In”, and chiefly the “Harlem Shuffle” vibes of “Red Right Hand”. That’s how it begins with the title track, and continues for most of the record – with a sinewy, dusty and happily malign take on funk. Martyn Casey’s bass often seems to be the dominant instrument (especially on “Today’s Lesson”), and a lot of the other Bad Seeds seem to squirt and explode in and out of a capacious mix. There’s a lot of economy and ideas in the playing here – it’s only rarely that you get a sense of the massed thunder of The Bad Seeds all clattering away at once. On the quite wonderful “Moonland” (a tense and beautiful rethink of a bunch of clichés involving cars, stars, snow, pensive time alone, and a whispering DJ on the radio), the low-slung atmospherics are punctuated by this weird, tight little drum rolls. On “Hold On To Yourself”, Warren Ellis’ violin flits in and out in the background like a bee swarm. Ellis seems to have taken over as Cave’s de facto musical director from Mick Harvey, though his fiddle is sparingly used. Instead, he meticulously organises guitars that creak like rusted hinges, and bluesy drum loops (on “Night Of The Lotus Eaters”) that could even have wandered off an early Beck record. The feel is still distinctly Cave-esque, though, since the open spaces allow the singer to squeeze in more words than ever. There’s a rollicking, picaresque feel to plenty of these songs (the title track, “Albert Goes West”, the litany of girls he’s loved before in the traditionally lengthy, verbose, Dylanish closer, “More News From Nowhere”), accentuated by the blokey choruses provided by the Bad Seeds. Much like the Grinderman set, Cave still has that stentorian gravity of legend, but his enjoyment in all this is much more open now. This comes to a head in “We Call Upon The Author”, a particularly gripping ramalam which finds Cave strenuously parodying himself as a beat poet and arbiter of staunch bohemian values in a world gone bad, or at the very least facile. “Our myxomatoid kids spraddle the streets,” he raves, hilariously, then yells, “Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix!” He coins a couple of new verbs, to guru and to mediocre, exclaims “Bukowski was a jerk! Berryman was best!” (which’ll definitely please Craig Finn) and lets a dying author pronounce, “Everything is banal and jejune”. It’s a genuinely funny, seriously erudite visitation of Grumpy Old Men. And it rocks, of course. Only once, I think, do we spot much personal detail. “Jesus Of The Moon” is one of those bruised and rueful ballads like “Rock Of Gibraltar”, in which latterday Cave grapples with the value – and the sometimes tricky realities – of a long-term emotional commitment. It’s here that he seems to come upon a manifesto for “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!” itself: “People often talk about being scared of change, but I’m more afraid of things staying the same,” he sings. “Cause the game is never won, By standing in any one place for too long.”

A couple of things that have been hanging around for a few weeks now, and deserve some love here. One is “Rosemarie”, the debut album by an authentically fragrant Cornish band of Pre-Raphaelite damsels and dazed troubadours called Thistletown. Give me any excuse, and I’ll go into a comically apoplectic rant about the uselessness of most contemporary British bands who style themselves as acid-folk. As usual, I suppose, it’s my inbuilt bias to American music – even when it’s interpreting British forms. But Thistletown are pretty good, even though the album has been produced - quite beautifully, I have to say - by Michael Tyack, leader of quite possibly the very worst comedy fol-de-rol merchants, Circulus (who always remind me, grimly, of The Amazing Blondel). Reading their biog, it’s easy to imagine Thistletown are as self-conscious an operation as Circulus, given that it involves winsome maidens, houseboats, homegrown vegetables, wandering drummers and so on. In truth though, their music is so willowy and harmonious, it serves to make all the rustic utopianism of the backstory sound highly appealing. If you’re looking for an old English comparison, Trees are probably the best. But it’s Philadelphia’s Espers who Thistletown most resemble, though with less of a witchy edge. The title track is especially lovely, pitched somewhere between motorik and jig, though I must say it’s pretty hard to write about accurately while AC/DC are playing on the stereo. Strange day here today, since our production editor received “Tracks’n’Grooves” by Cliff Richard in the post and tried to convince us (and himself, briefly) that it was Cliff’s “breaks” album. But I digress. The other thing I wanted to mention today was a new recording of Gavin Bryars’ “The Sinking Of The Titanic”. Bryars is a favourite composer of mine, ever since I came across the Tom Waits-augmented version of “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet” (ostensibly a tramp singing on a loop for an hour, augmented by Bryars’ gentle backgrounds and, in this case, a suitably ragged harmony from Waits). I saw a performance of “Titanic” years ago; wherein Bryars’ ebbing, super-slow orchestral minimalism was accompanied by a neon tube turning, over the course of an hour, from horizontal to vertical. This treatment is more layered and detailed than the one I have. It’s by Bryars (on double bass), an Italian ensemble called Alter Ego, and the sound artist Philip Jeck on turntables. Jeck is pretty interesting in a Christian Marclay kind of way, and it’s he who initially seems to dominate, prefacing the piece with a lot of staticky atmospherics. It creates a dusty rather than strictly damp atmosphere, but the ghostly ambience is striking, and when Alter Ego’s strings gradually come into focus, the effect is of something sombre and massive – a doomed ship, let’s say – emerging from the mist. Perfect.

In spite of my morbid suspicions about any record which features Har Mar Superstar, I find myself quite taken with the first album by Neon Neon. It's called "Stainless Style", and maybe it's acting as a kind of antidote to all the manly Led Zeppelin love I've indulged in these past few days. "Stainless Style" belongs on another planet to Led Zep, being, as I briefly mentioned yesterday, a concept album about John DeLorean and his beautiful, preposterous cars, set to '80s-vintage synthpop and a hearty dose of contemporary hip hop/R&B. Har Mar - or Sean Tillman as he's renamed here - is mercifully a marginal figure: Neon Neon is ostensibly the project of the mercurial Gruff Rhys and LA producer Boom Bip, whose work (as satellite member of the vastly overrated smart-arse hip hop collective Anticon and as a sort of subs'-bench Dangermouse) has never really done it for me. He does a pretty sterling job here, though, of joining the dots between robotic '80s pop and the randy, innovative R&B that flourished maybe five or six years ago. Gruff Rhys wanders through it all in a sort of imaginative daze, as usual, and I increasingly suspect he might be the strongest creative force in this mad and entertaining album. Which, with a bunch of passing hipster rappers guesting - Yo Majesty, Fatlip, the excellent Spank Rock - sometimes has the air of an updated, superior take on that Handsome Boy Modeling School/Deltron 3030 schtick of Dan The Automator (critical forerunners of the first Gorillaz album, of course, for better or worse). At the risk of making this blog denser than ever with references, I'm currently really taken with a sequence near the start of the album that begins with "I Lust U" (echoes of Visage here, specifically "Fade To Grey", so God knows why I'm enjoying this), runs through the Tillman/Spankrock face-off "Trick For Treat" (a dead ringer for NERD's "Lapdance"), then ends up with some synths on "Raquel" (as in Raquel Welch, who apparently had an affair with DeLorean) that have the luxuriant, kinetic quality of Kraftwerk ("Tour De France" - the original one - maybe?). Some of these tunes have sneaked out as singles over the past few months, but they work a lot better here, slotted into Rhys and Boom Bip's grand design. I say grand design, though the whole thing only lasts half an hour. Perhaps the pastiches work better here because they're contextualised by the odd burst of forward-thinking indie-pop like "I Told Her On Alderaan" and the wonderful"Steel Your Girl", where the melodic brilliance of Super Furry Animals shines through. An interesting and amusing album that's musically good enough to play again and again, though. Especially if you - and you'll notice I'm not using the first person here - fetishistically conflate sex with cars. Take a glimpse into the sweat shop; it's out on Lex at the end of February.