Mark Lanegan & Duke Garwood – Black Pudding (Ipecac Records)
The first immediately noticeable facet of anything involving Mark Lanegan is the voice at the songs’ core – the disconsolate yet stoic rasp, granite hard yet frayed as an old blanket. His voice’s raggedness, sounding half fallen apart and half adhered only through stubborn force of will, anchors the music that underpins it, in whatever form that may take.
Mark Lanegan & Duke Garwood – Black Pudding (Ipecac Records)
The first immediately noticeable facet of anything involving Mark Lanegan is the voice at the songs’ core – the disconsolate yet stoic rasp, granite hard yet frayed as an old blanket. His voice’s raggedness, sounding half fallen apart and half adhered only through stubborn force of will, anchors the music that underpins it, in whatever form that may take. From his early days with the Screaming Trees through his solo albums and his collaborations with Greg Dulli of Afghan Whigs, Isobel Campbell of Belle & Sebastian, or Queens Of The Stone Age, what occurs in support of his voice can be something of a mixed bag – sometimes brilliant, sometimes faltering under the weight of its ideas – but Lanegan’s presence adds a grit and a gravity that renders his best work untouchable, and his worst at least worthier of consideration than it would have been in anybody else’s hands.
Black Pudding, his collaboration with British multi-instrumentalist Duke Garwood, is no exception to any of this, though fortunately it falls towards the more soundly realized end of his spectrum of releases. It’s a low-key affair, the sandpaper vocals resting primarily atop sparse guitar constructions – ruminative, bluesy evocations of open spaces criss-crossed with roads leading to no place good. But while hued in the same noir tints as Lanegan’s best work, it’s hardly singular in its approach. The brief instrumentals that bookend the album’s bulk introduce, then gracefully give leave to, the mood sustained by all that’s between the two. Songs like “Pentecostal” and “Mescalito” present themselves as terse, almost grim unpackings of imagery, the former a meditation on the sort of moral grappling that often pops up in Lanegan’s lyrics, the latter a hazy, nostalgic reverie painted in the darkest Graham Greene-ish phrasing. On paper, it might seem that the subsequent deviations from this approach – the graveyard funk inclinations of a song like “Cold Molly” or the “Planet Caravan”-style meandering of “Sphinx,” for instance – would come off as horribly out of place, but in practice these only emphasize the album’s complexity and nuance, painting a sort of rainbow in shades of black. But the album’s most harrowing and affecting inner core comes through in a piece like “Last Rung,” material possessed so thoroughly of a sketch-like quality that it sounds more like late-night whiskey-drunk pecking at piano keys than a song per se. Its fragments of structure, which manifest themselves before falling apart again, are in turn interspersed with eerie pinprick high notes, whose appearances seem motivated by little other than initiating the sort of discomfort that can be instilled only by seemingly arbitrary and fleeting dissonance.
It may seem, given the indelible stamp that Lanegan applies to the recordings, to be a one-man show, and it may be easy to overlook Duke Garwood’s contributions, but his able performances bind the songs together, lithely working into the interstices between the album’s more monolithic components. Garwood’s long-standing working relationship with Lanegan spans three of the latter’s projects, having guested on Lanegan’s Blues Funeral and on the Gutter Twins’ Saturnalia album – to say nothing of a larger body of work that includes his own solo albums and collaborations with artists as disparate as Wire, Kurt Vile, and the Orb. This aptitude towards recognizing the strengths of those with whom he’s collaborating, and working to efficiently highlight them, manifests itself in the subtlety with which he approaches Black Pudding. Garwood understands that a sideman attempts to overwhelm a powerful singer at his own peril, and writes accordingly – subtle shades of tones flit shadow-like through the songs, highlighting their depth.
But regardless of which contributing musician does what, or which directions these songs may take, their brooding, imperturbable quality remains intact, each quietly but sternly confronting and coming to terms with an uncertain darkness. By resisting the temptation to confront the void with a roar when a whisper would wholly suffice, Lanegan and Garwood are able to maintain a cohesion throughout the album, not simply between the disparate elements brought to bear on the songs, but through the construction and maintenance of a singular mood. The coupling of careful restraint with ragged presentation that cuts through to the album’s core is a difficult balance to strike, one likely to be handled improperly by the inexperienced. But when it’s brought to fruition by musicians like those who crafted Black Pudding, those who have seen their way into the darkness and emerged again, returning to carry some remnant of it to listeners like some inverse bodhisattva, the results could only be as subtly exhilarating as these songs are.
