Mark Lanegan

By the time "Blues Funeral", his eighth album under his own name, came out, Mark Lanegan had survived a season that had already claimed Andy Wood, Kurt Cobain, Mike Starr, Layne Staley and Elliott Smith in the Pacific Northwest. Wanting to look ahead and avoid a dead end, artistically as much as anything else, Lanegan had learned to walk the ridge between death and resurrection, staring both in the eye and recounting their most feral, uncertain features like another "cursed" songwriter of American music, Johnny Cash, burned by addiction and by his love of folk music and June Carter. Lanegan and Cash didn't just bewitch listeners with their baritone voices, their visceral delivery and their vivid, image-laden lyrics — Lanegan would pay tribute to Cash's memory more than once — they also asked to be seen in the guise of Cain, or of the thieves crucified alongside Jesus. On the side of sinners, of the weak, of the outcast.

In the mid-1980s, in the state of Washington, Lanegan began his musical journey with Screaming Trees, whose success exploded alongside Seattle's grunge scene in the 90s. The city's greater area, stretching out to towns like Ellensburg and Aberdeen, buzzed with shows by the figureheads of a movement exploring rock's darkest, most flawed side, acts like Melvins, Soundgarden, Green River, Mudhoney and Mother Love Bone — followed by Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains — in a place where you grow up on beer, the Wailers, the Sonics and Jimi Hendrix.

A few supergroups were born too, like Mad Season, which the songwriter and singer joined alongside his own band's drummer, Barrett Martin. During these years Lanegan walked through fire: he became addicted to drugs and alcohol, lost loved ones — "Kurt was like a little brother, Layne was like a twin" — and got clean in California with the help of Courtney Love.

The novel of his life is made up of all these existential, hard-won chapters, each one immortalized by an album: the records under his own name (from "The Winding Sheet", 1990, to "Whiskey For The Holy Ghost", 1994), the collaborations (with Isobel Campbell above all, Twilight Singers, Soulsavers, Duke Garwood and, more recently, Not Waving under the alias Dark Mark) and the bands he's been part of (Queens Of The Stone Age and Gutter Twins).

After making "Hawk" (V2, 2010) with the singer and cellist of Belle & Sebastian — a hypnotic folk-blues songwriting exercise that digs deep into the American tradition — Lanegan returned to solo work, aided by a group of friends and collaborators: Jack Irons on drums and Alain Johannes, back on production duties after "Bubblegum" (Beggars Banquet, 2004), handling the rest of the instruments — to close out a career-defining album. Alongside the duo backing him on the recordings, there were other guests too: Greg Dulli (Afghan Whigs, Twilight Singers, Gutter Twins), Josh Homme (Kyuss, Queens Of The Stone Age), Duke Garwood, David Catching (Eagles of Death Metal, Mondo Generator, Queens Of The Stone Age), David Rosser (Twilight Singers, Afghan Whigs), Martin LeNoble (Jane's Addiction, Porno For Pyros, Cult), Aldo Struyf, Shelley Brien and Chris Goss.

"Blues Funeral" is a compact, cohesive work, yet at the same time made up of well-defined tracks that are diverse in sound and in the styles they draw on. On its release, the album wrong-footed Lanegan's listeners – the review OndaRock published back then reflects this disorientation – because the Ellensburg singer-songwriter had blended his typical mix of blues, folk, rock and psychedelia (“The Gravedigger's Song”, “Bleeding Muddy Water”, “Riot In My House”) with the electronic sounds of new wave and pop-rock arrangement choices that wouldn't sound out of place alongside New Order (“Gray Goes Black”). This blend of styles is the sonic body that lets the crooner's voice unfurl visions, flashes of memory and moments of deep truth that lay him bare in tones less epic than before.

The most personal results of these hybridizations are found in the album's central stretch, starting with the americana-style electro ballad “St. Louis Elegy”, a bleak fresco of resurrection steeped in the Bible, Edgar Allan Poe and William Burroughs, backed by Dulli's harmonies:

I think I see forever

Across on the other side

I look at the sky

I see a nightbird as it flies

Over the old bent cherry trees

Shivering in a row

Down here the winter

Will cut you quick

These tears are liquor

Oh yeah

And I’ve drunk myself sick

or in the rock stride of “Ode To Sad Disco”'s guitar strokes, steeped in electronic beats and keys, in a prayer that turns into dance and catharsis:

Gloria

I get down on my knees

Further from my own

Under a cliff

Darkness denied

Here I have seen the light

Here I have seen the light

Here I have seen the light

Here I have seen the light

or again in the smooth, black-tinged ballad “Phantasmagoria Blues”:

I thought I'd rule like Charlemagne

But I've become corrupt

Now I crawl the promenade

To fill my empty cup

And you’re free

You’re free again

One more time

Now if you found a razor blade

And took it to your wrist

Then I’d be here in my electric chair

Because of this

in the dance-rock psychedelia of "Quiver Syndrome", which nods to the Dandy Warhols:

Will the lord hold me down ‘cause I’m wicked?

Will the lord hold me down, to my shame?

Will your love it get into me Jesus?

Now I heard you calling out my name

and in the irresistible electro-rock of "Harborview Hospital", where a groove cuts through the drama of the lyrics and offers at least some comfort to the body:

The devil’s ascended

Upon some crystal wings

In the citadel lightning

Splits a cloud of butterflies and fiends

And with a vacant stare I’ll leave a flower there

They’re riding, they’re riding

A hellhound down the hill

They’re sinking, they’re sinking

Into the ocean, beautiful and still

And yet it’s hard to leave in wealth or poverty

The album's closing trio returns to more familiar territory, where a leaner sound brings out the shadows of the Beatles ("Leviathan") and Nick Cave ("Deep Black Vanishing Train"), with a bare-bones, Lanegan-esque folk-blues that foreshadows his collaborations with Garwood.

The final track is yet another masterstroke with which the songwriter manages to catch us off guard ("Tiny Grain Of Truth"), amid whistling distortion and electronic kick-and-snare, leaving the door open to the experiments that would follow on later, if less inspired, albums ("Gargoyle", 2017, and "Somebody's Knocking", 2019).

So "Blues Funeral" is the album that stunned us, and one we've never stopped listening to. Over the years it has established itself as the most unexpected work by the Ellensburg crooner, but also the one where he sounds most mature and most in command of his own means, able to surprise both listeners and Lanegan himself - an author and performer never satisfied with the goal already reached, never convinced by any certainty, always chasing songs that could place him "elsewhere", outside fixed genres, away from the most painful emotions and from depression, yet still within his own roots and memories, even the hardest ones, which he never stopped confronting.

We're certain he would have had much more to say, that he would have surprised us again, and that his will be one of the voices we miss the most.

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27/02/2022