Feb. 15, 2012 - Issue #852: The Coffee Issue
Blues Funeral
Mark Lanegan {recordings_bands_mg} Blues Funeral {/recordings_bands_mg}
4AD, 2012
4
"With piranha teeth / I've been dreaming of you," begins Mark Lanegan, in his tombstone baritone, at the start of "The Gravedigger's Song." That's his come hither: over chugging, fuzzed-out bass, a digital stutter and a rattling Jack Irons drum run, the first song on Blues Funeral turns out to be a love ballad, or at least as much of one as Lanegan's capable of. It laments one no longer with him, but undercuts the heaviness of sentiment with a disaffected shrug in the way only the ex-Screaming Trees turned ex-Queens of the Stone Age member could. You can almost hear the grin hidden underneath all the mourning.
Happy Valentine's day everybody. Mark Lanegan sent a black bouquet in Blues Funeral, and it's the finest solo gesture he's made in at least a few albums (and his first solo release since 2004's Bubblegum). Lanegan seems to exist outside the streams of style or time: he toils on whatever ideas he's interested in at his own pace, regardless of whatever else is going on—often stripped down to let that whisky-soaked voice really ring out over the notes. But despite Blues Funeral's lyrical focus on death and the departed, Lanegan sounds energized and lively: the guitars are plugged in and amped up, Iron's drumming is rhythmic and nuanced, and Alain Johannes's production makes the overall sound much larger than usual.
The morbid subject matter of the lyrics rarely enters into the instrumentation, instead letting the instrumentals play off the sentiment and balance it out into something hypnotic. Simmering ballad "Bleeding Muddy Water" delivers lines like "You're the bullet in the gun / Muddy Water, you're heaven sung" with guitars that rise up in almost a wash of relief. "Gray Goes Black" is as close to an indie-rocker as anything Lanegan's ever written; "Ode to Sad Disco" is probably the most danceable thing he's ever done.
Album standout "St Louis Elegy" abandons words altogether at its chorus, letting Lanegan's croon rise above in a wash of sound. It is, in a way, playing to his usual strength: Mark Lanegan's strongest weapon has always been that singular, impossibly ochre voice, and it's never wasted, though it sometimes feels like a crutch he leans on; some of his more strip-the-bones acoustic releases simply feel like a vehicle for that voice. Not on Blues Funeral: here, the music has its own propulsion and pull, and it complements what's already an unnatural instrument. On "Elegy," and the rest of Blues Funeral, the pairing is transcendent. vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus
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