So there I was, sitting in my gloom with a downloaded copy of The Stooges’ new album The Weirdness, my hopes for rock music circa 2007 shot to hell. Who could have guessed that, after the supercharged live shows Iggy and the Asheton brothers have put on since getting back together around 2003, their efforts at creativity would fall so flat? I was hoping for another Funhouse, and instead Iggy and crew delivered something more properly called Outhouse.

Yep, Iggy’s new one was a real pile of doo-doo, the unwanted return of the naughty little doggie of the mid-1990s. What was even more distressing was the rationalizations being offered for this in some of the major rock mags like Rolling Stone, along the lines of, “They’re old, what did you expect?” This seemed an insufficient explanation to me. I mean, even the last album by the more ancient Rolling Stones (A Bigger Bang) sounds like a stone cold classic when put up against The Stooges’ attempt at a recorded comeback. Something went wrong here somewhere, and I stubbornly refused to believe that it was merely age itself that did Iggy and the Ashetons in.

Then came the miracle. Just as I was about to give in to the theory that rock should have a mandatory retirement age, along came this thing merely called Grinderman, which turned out to be the new project of another of my all-time faves, Nick Cave. Yes, Nick Cave is 10 years younger than Iggy Pop (he’s 49, my own age), but he’s certainly no spring chicken when it comes to rock and roll, which, if you want to compare it to a sport, has always been more like tennis, where one peaks in his or her mid-20s, and after that, it’s all downhill. Watching my old hero John McEnroe play tennis on the senior circuit is somewhat similar to seeing a band like The Stones in concert: they both expertly conjure up images of what used to be, but the danger that characterized them at their peak is gone. McEnroe challenging a line call on the seniors tour or the Stones hauling out “Sympathy For The Devil”in concert: both are now ironic simulacra of something that used to be experienced by the audience as “authentic.” After hearing Grinderman, however, I am now convinced that Nick Cave has successfully grasped this notion, and come up with a way to bridge the gap between his younger, more “rebellious” persona in the Aussie post-punk legends The Birthday Party and the early versions of The Bad Seeds, and his current, less drug-addled, more “mature” self — something that Iggy Pop has utterly failed to do on The Weirdness, where the gap becomes so wide that he and the band disappear into it.

Simply put, I doubt I’ll hear a better rock album than Grinderman this year, or maybe for many years. What makes this even more ironic is that Grinderman draws heavily on Cave’s formative rock influences, The Stooges(!) and the Velvet Underground, for its musical base, whilst The Weirdness instead often sounds like a pale version of the latter-day Ramones. While Ron Asheton (RIP) sounds here like any aging mediocre blues-rock guitarist (I say mediocre, because Johnny Winter he wasn’t, not even the “old” Johnny Winter I just saw at a sold-out B.B. King’s in Times Square a few weeks back), compare Cave’s rudimentary guitar playing on Grinderman’s pulverizing opening tracks, “Get It On” (a thinly-veiled homage to Marc Bolan and T. Rex) and the hilarious “No Pussy Blues.” Cave’s method? Stomp on that wah-wah pedal and let it rip – the old Asheton aesthetic. There is a joy and exhilaration in Cave’s new music, the joy of being freed from the constraints of a working process that had become stale. Cave, along with his musical comrades in Grinderman (genius/madman violinist Warren Ellis of The Dirty Three, along with erstwhile Bad Seeds Martyn Casey [bass] and Jim Sclavunos [drums]) re-embraces musical primitivism on Grinderman, but does so while delivering darkly humorous lyrics that root him in the present, not in some longed-for rebellious past. “My face is finished / My body’s gone” Cave declares at the start of “No Pussy Blues,” which unrolls a litany of sexual failure. “I combed my hairs across my head / I sucked in gut and still she said / that she didn’t want to.” Can anyone imagine Iggy Pop, with his hair weave and (admitted) steroid-enhanced physique (hey, how else do you think he looks like that at age 60?), ever admitting that he’s like everyone else: subject to the ravages of time? While Iggy, it seems, must forever play the shirtless teenage Superman, Nick Cave, receding hairline and all, is going down slow with the rest of us, but not without a fight.

Not that Grinderman is all Caveman-styled huffing and puffing against the dying of the light. Songs like the mesmerizing “Electric Alice” and the title track conjure the atmosphere of the first two Velvet Underground albums, with Cave offering lyrics over “Venus In Furs”-styled drones. Likewise, the Tom Waits-styled, off-kilter ballad “Man In The Moon” is a touching tribute to Cave’s deceased father (“Sitting here scratching in this rented room / scratching and a tappin’ to the man in the moon / ‘bout all the things that I’ve been taught / my daddy was an astronaut). But unlike on recent Bad Seeds albums, including the heralded “comeback” Abbatoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus, where the proceedings tended to get bogged down in piano balladry and excessive Judeo-Christian imagery, Cave keeps things grounded in messy reality on Grinderman, with able assistance from producer Nick Launay: even the softer stuff here fairly crackles with an in-your-face, barely controlled energy. No time for weepy paeans to the innocence of the Virgin Mary here: instead, Cave and company give us lascivious punk-blues odes to happy, drug-addicted whores (“Depth Charge Ethel”) capable of providing life-altering experiences.

None of this, of course, is to say that in ten years, Nick Cave won’t make an album of born-again balladry even more crap than The Weirdness. And yes, I’ll still be heading off to get my live dose of The Stooges tonight, bad album or no. But Grinderman does provide some badly needed, compelling proof that aging need not necessarily impede one’s ability to create vital rock and roll. Grinderman isn’t just a great rock album for a near-50 year-old: it’s a great rock album, period – one of the very best of Nick Cave’s storied career