Red Mosquito

kreng wrote:Just a heads up, winding sheet is by no means shit but it’s probably his “worst” record.

durdencommatyler wrote:I'm not gonna stop there. Even if I hate it, I'll give him another record or two before I give up. Be it I'm not worried about giving up.

durdencommatyler wrote:The Winding Sheet is decent. Nothing super exceptional on first listen but certainly a competent record with some wonderful moments.

Whisky For The Holy Ghost is fucking great though! I'm loving the shit out of this record.

Having indulged his more playful side on Gargoyle (2017) and Somebody’s Knocking (2019), Mark Lanegan had any residual cheer knocked out of him in the process of writing his unflinching memoir, Sing Backwards And Weep. A gripping, unsettling read, it had its author open up a time capsule full of misery, and a desire to do something with that freshly excavated woe is what resulted in Straight Songs Of Sorrow.
The book is very much a solitary tale, but its companion piece finds Lanegan surrounded by friends and collaborators, including – among others – Greg? Dulli (The Afghan Whigs), Simon Bonney (Crime & the City Solution), Jack Bates (Smashing Pumpkins, son of Peter Hook), Adrian Utley (Portishead) and Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones.
An overture of sorts, opener I Wouldn’t Want To Say has the songwriter wondering aloud:
“Who knows how many more years there will be before the end of this sad machine?” against a backdrop of roving electronica. Originally intended for a collaboration with Mark Stewart (The Pop Group), Lanegan quickly realised the track offered the perfect introduction to his story. Thirty years on from his first solo record, Straight Songs Of Sorrow is the one to put everything in perspective.
Straight is the operative word here. The album was made in something of a hurry, with ML reportedly only having around three weeks to pull it all together. This urgency seems to have had a positive impact on the material, with raw moments of reflection having been captured before they had time to ferment, grow stale, or come under scrutiny.
Apples From A Tree and Hanging On started life as abstract snippets of fingerpicked guitar, offered up by Mark Morton of Lamb Of God as part of a potentially larger work. Enchanted with the Jansch-like flavour of the pieces, Lanegan recorded the vocal for the first within 10 minutes of having received it. Hanging On followed suit, and was dedicated to Earth’s Dylan Carlson, one of his oldest friends. The track stands as both an affectionate tribute, and an uncomfortable acknowledgement of survival: “By all rights we should be gone, but you and me still hanging on.”Though there’s a haunting, dark folk vein running through it, Straight Songs Of Sorrow is markedly diverse. Churchbells, Ghosts is caught somewhere between Tom Waits and Ultravox, while Ballad Of
A Dying Rover has ML evoking both Iggy Pop and Captain Beefheart over blaring psychedelia.
Ketamine is a badass, piano-driven dirge, and the lyrics find Lanegan squaring up to his maker, as if chastising him for presiding over the last 30 or so years. “Cos if I had a rifle I’d shoot it straight up in the air/And watch you fall back down to earth with a wild-eyed graveyard stare.”
Daylight In The Nocturnal House and Stockholm City Blues are worthy of special mention, with the wrenching wail of Warren Ellis’ fiddle like a dozen fish hooks to the heart. Though Lanegan is known for dark laments, these two cut especially deep.
His voice displays an affecting vulnerability, and on the latter track he sings ruefully of past dependency: “I’ve paid for this pain I’ve put into my blood/No one could ever tell me that enough’s enough”.
Over the course of an hour, Straight Songs unloads a lifetime of pain. But there is a happy ending to this story. Whereas much of the album has him merely “hanging on”, by Eden Lost And Found – a track built from a mobile phone recording of his wife messing around with an old Casio keyboard – he has embraced survival and moves towards his new dawn with, if not quite piranha teeth, then a mischievous, Cheshire cat grin.



Q+A

Mark Lanegan on catharsis and Oasis

Is this the record that most accurately represents who you are?
There’s a depth of emotion and perhaps an honesty to it that I may never have had on a record before. I don’t know if that’s because the book was so eviscerating? It really did a number on me. But the gift of that book was these songs. It’s rare that a song that I write affects me in some sort of emotional way, but there’s several on this record that do. Songs aren’t real life, you know? They start in some form of reality and quickly become something else. But these all relate to certain experiences, people that I knew, vivid memories. And almost every one of them is about something real. And that’s not the case with the rest of my records! [laughs]

It’s perhaps your most eclectic, and seems to tell your story stylistically as well as thematically.
You know, [Jeff Barrett at Heavenly Records, and Lee Brackstone at White Rabbit Books] had requested that I make a record that was stripped down – more along the lines of what I started with [in 1990]. I thought, “Yeah, it’d be great to have
a record with those elements, but I can’t make a whole record like that.” It had to have elements of what I do now in it. But when they heard it, they were enthusiastic, and I was glad, because even though a song might go from all crazy synthesizer sounds and a drum machine to acoustic guitar and strings, I felt like it was cohesive, you know?

You’ve said that you didn’t find writing the book cathartic. Was the experience of writing and recording this album different in that respect?
Oh, yeah, like I said, the record was the gift of the book. The record never would have existed had it not been for the painful experience of writing this book – which, by the way, I will never do again! [laughs heartily]
That was something I kind of foolishly walked into, eyes shut, and then quickly had them opened, but the catharsis was these songs. I’m not somebody who feels a lot of pride in the music that I make, but I actually feel pride in this record, and that’s a new kind of feeling for me.
I actually am more proud of this record than anything I’ve ever done, except for Field Songs [2001] and Blues Funeral [2012].
The record mirrors the book in its frankness. Did you worry about being so exposed?
With the book, definitely. I had to do a lot of soul searching. Did I really want to tell a bunch of stories about my very close friends, who are also like… icons, who are not with us anymore? Was it fair to them? You know, Jerry Cantrell of Alice In Chains is a good friend of mine. And Layne Stayley was my best friend. Everyone knows about his problems, and how he passed away. But those [AIC] guys have always gone out of their way to preserve his legacy. I just had to run it by Jerry.
He just said, “Man, this is your story and Layne was a huge part of it.” But it opened up this sort of feeling I hadn’t recognised or felt before. Of course, I felt a lot of guilt at the time over my actions, and what I did and didn’t do that hurt people that I loved. But writing about it brought up a different kind of guilt, you know? A lot of different emotions. It also gave me the opportunity to talk a lot of shit about Liam Gallagher, so it was almost worth it for that reason alone [laughs].
As told to Alun Hamnett

kreng wrote:

kreng wrote:this book is going to be ROUGH

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/musi ... ey-978123/

stip wrote:I bet that book is amazing.


Joey, I'm glad you love Whisky for the Holy Ghost. The run of records from Whisky through Blues Funeral is astonishing, and a few of the side projects (the soulsavers records in particular) are every bit as good.

But if you're not familiar, the two best Screaming Trees albums (Shadow of the Season and Dust) are just phenomenal. Shadow is maybe the most archtypical grunge record of them all (when people hear the phrase this is what they think of). Dust is a much more expansive record.

kreng wrote:https://recordcollectormag.com/reviews/straight-songs-of-sorrow

Dark Mark wrote:It also gave me the opportunity to talk a lot of shit about Liam Gallagher, so it was almost worth it for that reason alone [laughs].

kreng wrote:new album is out there people.