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More rock than roll
The menace of Mark Lanegan
BY MAC RANDALL

Over a transcontinental phone line, Mark Lanegan chuckles. It’s a dusty, cracked chuckle, the kind of sound you could imagine coming out of a bone-dry riverbed. "Well," he says with an audible grin, "I haven’t been accused too often of losing my menace. I’ve sometimes been called a menace, but that’s a whole other story."

Actually, I hadn’t accused Lanegan of losing his menace. Who could? The sense of danger lurking in his dark, raspy baritone has been a constant since he first appeared on the Seattle rock scene in the ’80s as lead singer for the Screaming Trees. My real point was this: when he sings with a full-on rock band, whether it be the Trees or the group he’s more recently been involved with, Queens of the Stone Age, that innate vocal quality can get buried underneath all the loud guitars. Meanwhile, his solo albums — a marvelous string of discs that commenced with 1990’s The Winding Sheet (Sub Pop) — push the ominous depths of his singing to the fore. But those albums have generally been quieter, more-acoustic affairs, steeped in blues, country, and folk.

It’s a paradox of sorts: one of rock and roll’s great voices hasn’t always sounded at home in rock and roll. But on Lanegan’s latest, Bubblegum (Beggars Banquet), he seems to have the problem sorted out. Never before has one of his own albums featured so many heavy rock songs, from the bass-pounding "Hit the City" to the fractured metal opus "Methamphetamine Blues" and the revved-up punk of "Sideways in Reverse." Yet no matter what the backdrop, his singing remains undiluted; the menace comes through perfectly.

"I’d been thinking for a while about doing something that was a little more even," he explains. "All the records between Winding Sheet and Field Songs [2001] have songs that are, for lack of a better term, just as rockin’ as anything on Bubblegum, but the ratio was always about three quiet to one loud. This time, I wanted to make that ratio more like half and half."

Combining hi-tech drum machines and lo-fi distorted guitars, the loud songs on Bubblegum tap into a clanking, march-to-the-graveyard vibe that’s reminiscent of at least two other rough-throated singers, Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart. (The Beefheart parallel is an easy one to draw because Lanegan covered a Beefheart tune, "Clear Spot," on Here Comes That Weird Chill, an eight-song EP released as a kind of advance taster for Bubblegum last fall.) But the quiet tunes are just as noteworthy, particularly "One Hundred Days," a stark picture of addiction ("I’d stop and talk to the girls who work this street, but I’ve got business further down") that he invests with a trademark mix of tenderness and resignation.

According to the front cover of the CD, Bubblegum is a product of the Mark Lanegan Band, but in fact there’s no consistent outfit here; personnel credits vary considerably from track to track. Among the occasional contributors are Queens of the Stone Age guitarist Josh Homme and bassist Nick Oliveri, former Guns N’ Roses mates Izzy Stradlin and Duff McKagan, and another singer whose music is frequently compared with Captain Beefheart’s, Polly Jean Harvey. It’s a tribute to Lanegan’s strength as a frontman that Harvey’s powerful backing vocals on "Hit the City" and "Come to Me" don’t overwhelm his performance; the two sound great together, but he’s clearly in charge — as he is from start to finish on this album.

Besides the songs that appear on Bubblegum and Here Comes That Weird Chill, Lanegan recorded enough extra music last year to warrant a second EP, one that may see the light of day this fall. "We got a lot recorded in a short period of time, for whatever reason. The rare part was that I liked most of it. And when you’re in the studio being creative, you tend to come up with even more because you’re already thinking that way. So a lot of stuff popped up at the last minute. Toward the end of the record, I was in the studio doing something else altogether, for a completely different project, and I came up with ‘Sideways in Reverse’ and ‘Out of Nowhere’ really fast, while everyone was still setting up."

What was the other project? "I was working on a cover song for a tribute record," he says cagily, "but I’d rather not say any more about it because I was in there on somebody else’s dime — I shouldn’t have been recording my own stuff." Another chuckle follows, like the rustle of dead leaves in the wind.

Come September, you’ll be able to hear Lanegan’s wealth of new material in person, as he hits the road for a US tour whose dates have yet to be announced, backed by a real live Mark Lanegan Band. They’ll reach Boston toward the end of September. Expect menace.


Issue Date: August 27 - September 2, 2004
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