Grinderman, Nick Cave‰’s relatively new collaboration with three of his Bad Seeds bandmates, played their noisy blues at the 9:30 Club last Tuesday. The band was born when Cave decided to write music on a guitar rather than his preferred piano. He discovered that he wasn‰’t very good at playing the guitar anymore, but that maybe this was a direction worth pursuing. Four years later, Grinderman have released one of the year‰’s best albums and embarked on their second North American tour.

From the show‰’s first moments to its last, everything was loud, unless the band were playing a quiet build-up to an otherwise loud song. This is mostly the fault of Grinderman‰’s most heavily-bearded member, Warren Ellis. While the rhythm section chugged through steady backbeats, Ellis played guitar, electric mandolin and violin, and occasionally banged on a cymbal. Everything about Ellis‰’ playing exists to intentionally screw up the rest of the music, making calm moments creepy and the loudest moments pure noise. When he played the violin, he did so with a clearly mangled bow, and when he played guitar his hands violently whisked over the strings.

Grinderman powered through the entirety of their new album, the nearly self-titled Grinderman 2, and about half of their first album. The new material is more aggressive and outwardly angry, whereas the older songs use noise as a medium to express Cave‰’s frustration with himself. Regardless of the noise‰’s intention, all of it rips right through you in a live setting, where Cave and Ellis‰’ instruments are backed by a small wall of amps.

The late-set performance of Grinderman‰’s first single, “No Pussy Blues‰” was an easy highlight. The song began with a simple, repetitive drum beat and bass line as Cave looked out into the audience and monologued about falling hard for a woman who “just never wanted to.‰” Like the band‰’s most vicious songs, “No Pussy Blues‰” lived in its quiet rhythm section for an uncomfortably long time. Warren Ellis‰’ hands hovered over his guitar, waiting to let loose, while Cave stood at the edge of the stage, scrunching up his face and bemoaning his romantic and sexual failings.

“I felt like fucking Marceau fucking Marceau must feel when she said that she just ab-so-lu-tely did. not. want. to,‰” he sang, slowing down every last syllable. After that line everything got somehow even more hushed and Cave repeated the song‰’s title a few times as he strapped his guitar on. It stayed quiet until it hurt to stay quiet, and then the near-silence lasted another five seconds until the guitars finally kicked in and the room blew up.

Conceptually, this is the music that parent groups worried about when Elvis started shaking his hips. This is loud, angry, cathartic music played by men in their late 40s/early 50s to a crowd of people losing their minds every time Nick Cave humps the air or Warren Ellis slams a maraca into his electric mandolin.

This is also a project by four people who have an inherent knowledge of what it means to be cool. Cave has been balding for the last twenty years and he‰’s turned it into a rock star hairstyle. He‰’s singing about not having sex and turning into a werewolf and flying to Mars and none of it comes off as anything but badass; most other bands would unintentionally turn it into kitsch. He wore a fitted suit throughout the band‰’s ninety-minute-long set even though it made him sweat. In the end, the sweat somehow made him look more ferocious, and again the crowd had to marvel at how cool the band was.

When you walk into a Grinderman show, you get the sense that you are the youngest person to have ever discovered Nick Cave‰’s music. Everybody else is in their early-30s and has just gotten off of work. Normally this would be a sign that the band about to take the stage was completely irrelevant, but in the case of Grinderman, it‰’s a sign that when people start listening to Nick Cave, they don‰’t stop. As his fans get older, they continue to care about the man‰’s music the way they did when they first discovered it.

Even six years into The Hold Steady‰’s life, they have let me down. Clinic have started to make one or two great songs per album after running out of the gate with two perfect records. Autolux had a terrific debut and then spent six years working on its garbage follow-up. Most artists don‰’t last as long as Nick Cave because, frankly, most artists aren‰’t as good. When one comes about you cling to him. As hyperbolic as this sounds, I don‰’t think that Nick Cave has put out a sub-par album in his 37-year career. From The Boys Next Door‰’s Door, Door to Grinderman‰’s show on Tuesday, Cave and his bands have accomplished enough that their followers will stay with them as long as Cave continues to pump out new material. Nobody does what Nick Cave does, and if they did they wouldn‰’t do it as well. If I‰’m rambling on (and I am hella rambling on), it‰’s because a week later I still think that the best thing I could do with my time and money would be to fly home to San Francisco and catch Grinderman live before they disappear for another three years.