The wild eyed preacher has returned to the pulpit. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds new album Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! has been sent down from high for us poor mortals to make of it what we will.

I rub my hands with expectation but wring them with dread at the same time. ‘Can he do it again?’ I always wonder. This time, after Nick Cave’s glorious dig at the musical oligarchs during last year’s ARIA Awards, it was even worse. Would rock royalty status finally bring him down? Was that award just a vicious conspiracy by Wolfmother and The Veronicas to do him in – a poison chalice, like one of Castro’s cigars?

Well it’s out – and it didn’t all go wrong. Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! is a classic Nick Cave belter. Different from what’s come before in many ways, the album still maintains that towering Nick Cave standard. It has the dark puppeteer ballads that are quintessentially modern Nick Cave but it also has tracks that take you back to the early Bad Seed’s albums and even further. There is more rock and roll in his new album but there is also a couple of tracks that verge on danceable.

The title track immediately reinforces something about Nick Cave. Sure he’s a great musician, a great performer, sure he’s been one of the most influential musicians Australia has ever produced, but beyond that he is something few musicians are these days – he’s just a fucking great storyteller. This new album proves it again.

Each song is a novella in its own right. Each song creates vision, both dark and light. There are not many musicians that can hold up the hand of literary genius. Nick Cave, like Lou Reed, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, like Joni Mitchell and Suzanne Vega, is probably closer than most. Nick Cave can tell a bloody good story.

Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! is, in some ways, more mainstream – or at least digestible – than much of Nick Cave’s recent stuff. It’s more marketable perhaps because it has some rock and roll thrown in with those tortured, booming ballads.

Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! is a tome of short, sharp literary and musical whippets. All in all, you’re on a thunderous rollercoaster ride with the high priest of some weird cult standing up in the front car, waving his bony arms about like a loony.