Take the sugary title with a sack of salt. When Mark Lanegan opens his mouth you don’t see candy-coloured tangerine dream flakes. You see listing rows of tombstone teeth, coughed up cemetery gravel, untipped Camel smoke, gaseous acid reflux, ashen issue of the belly of hell. ‘Scuse the verbose prose, but this guy could sing Dan Brown and make it sound like Leviticus and Deuteronomy.
The school I attended, if some dirty little urchin broke foul wind in class, the boys seated around him would wrinkle their noses and say, ‘Something crawled up your leg and died inside you, boy.’ The way Lanegan sings, it sounds like something died inside him a long time ago.
At Seattle’s apogee, Ellensburg’s Screaming Trees were the anti-Pearl Jam, hulking woodsmen in thrall to Sabs/Zep heaviness, but with Bad Flag attitude in place of hosepipe posturing. Anyone hypothesising where Nirvana might’ve gone after Unplugged would do well to revisit his first album The Winding Sheet or Whiskey For The Holy Ghost, which suggested Shane MacGowan’s lyrical bent set to sepulchral folk.
Since 2001’s Field Songs, Lanegan’s been the shadow over everyone’s shoulder, a trucker-capped cadaver skulking in the Mondo Generator tweaker compound or at the Desert Sessions. He seems far more comfortable playing collaborator rather than self promoter, and in the news section on his website, the following notice has been posted: “I deeply regret that I cannot tour with the MC5 this summer due to conflicting business schedules.”
But enough preamble. Bubblegum is his best and most ambitious record to date. The cast list includes Duff and Izzy from G ‘N’ R, Greg Dulli, Dean Ween, all the Queens, plus Wendy Rae Fowler and PJ Harvey. The spread of styles encompasses urban distorto motorvating hymns (‘Driving Death Valley Blues’), neo-industrial cipher songs (‘Head’), and copious moaning-at-midnight creeping jesus balladry, every last word tortured and interrogated for depth by the main man’s wolfish growl. Polly Jean provides his perfect foil on ‘Hit The City’ and ‘Come To Me’, one loud and blood red, the other frayed and hangdog.
But notwithstanding tunes like ‘Methamphetamine Blues’ and ‘Can’t Come Down’ – which don’t so much reek of narcotics as epinephrine, the pheromonal smell of fear and tension – Lanegan has the soul of a bluesman encased in chainmail. You can hear this in the way he worries over his phrasing in the guttural ‘Like Little Willie John’ (“Lord I’m all alone tonight/Don’t the sun love its satellite”), repeating and reiterating, milking every possible variation of meaning from the vowels. You can also hear it in the numerous laudanum-tinctured ballads he seems to love so much (‘One Hundred Days’, ‘Bombed’, ‘Morning Glory Wine’).
But it’s the opening tune, ‘When Your Number Isn’t Up’, that tells all you need to know about this, his sixth album. “Turn out the lights/Don’t see me drawn and hollow,” Lanegan groans, over music so bare-boned it sounds like nothing at all. “It’s a different world/They left you to this/To janitor/The emptiness/ . . . So let’s get it on.”
Lanegan’s ball is a monster’s ball.
Welcome to his nocturama.