Mark Lanegan Band – Blues Funeral (4AD Records)
I’m all for truth in advertising, but the title of Mark Lanegan’s newest album is just a little too obvious. Blues Funeral? No shit. Has Lanegan ever done anything that hasn’t been imparted with at least some veneer of bluesiness through his croaking baritone? Has he ever done anything that’s not as bleak as a terminal diagnosis? I mean, he might as well have called it Music Songs or something.
Mark Lanegan Band – Blues Funeral (4AD Records)
I’m all for truth in advertising, but the title of Mark Lanegan’s newest album is just a little too obvious. Blues Funeral? No shit. Has Lanegan ever done anything that hasn’t been imparted with at least some veneer of bluesiness through his croaking baritone? Has he ever done anything that’s not as bleak as a terminal diagnosis? I mean, he might as well have called it Music Songs or something. But leave it to somebody who’s dwelled so long in the wasteland to be able to explore the nuances of all those moments in life that sane, balanced people (or at the very least, people who aspire to sanity and balance) pay professionals substantial sums of money to help them forget.
Lanegan’s body of work has varied fairly widely in quality, depending upon the artists with whom he’s working at any particular moment. For instance, The Gutter Twins, his band with Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs and Twilight Singers, was responsible for one of the best albums of the past decade, while his work with Isobel Campbell of Belle & Sebastian resulted in several albums that are, at best, the sort of thing that wouldn’t piss anybody off if they were played in the background of an overpriced coffee shop. But largely, he’s been able to balance out his inconsistencies through the strength of his better work. In this sense, Blues Funeral could almost be seen as a sort of metaphor for his larger oeuvre – despite its overarching theme, it rapidly veers between sonic extremes and reflects some of his best and worst characteristics, though on the whole it leans more towards the positive.
When Lanegan’s on target, his music is nothing short of devastating. And those moments are certainly present. “The Gravedigger’s Song” and “Riot in My House” aren’t terribly far removed from the work he did with Queens of the Stone Age; blustery stomp that distends single Black Sabbath moments into a minimal, pouding backdrop for his lamentations. On the opposite side of the coin, songs like “Deep Black Vanishing Train” or “Leviathan” wallow in lugubrious acoustic dirge that sounds like Lanegan has never before heard a major chord. In between the two poles, songs like “Grey Goes Black” and “Quiver Syndrome” are surprisingly poppy and catchy for an artist so entrenched in the dour side of the emotional spectrum.
Blues Funeral suffers from two main problems, however. The first is Lanegan’s insistence on incorporating ill-advised electronic elements. There’s nothing inherently wrong with bringing in the drum machines and keyboards, but a lot of electronica evolves at a fairly rapid clip and it’s easy for such elements to seem dated, as they often do on this album. Songs like (the overly-literally titled) “Ode to Sad Disco” and “Harborview Hospital” pull in the sort of pre-programmed drum machine elements that opportunistic producers splattered all over U2 and David Gray albums in the 90s, assuming it would render the songs au courant but instead placing upon them an unmistakable date stamp.
Lanegan also has some trouble with his lyrics from time to time. It’s not the he’s a bad lyricist, it’s just that sometimes the imagery slips away from him. I can see what he’s trying to do with a line like “If tears were liquor I’d have drunk myself sick,” but the metaphor isn’t strong. And while his voice is imbued with a gravity that can cover up some less than amazing turns of phrase (let it never be said he doesn’t have an excellent voice – it propels his good work into greatness and saves his worst output from being totally abysmal), some of it possesses a level of abstraction that doesn’t work well with music as gritty and bluesy as is present on this album.
If we’ve learned anything from the millenia of recorded history that trail behind us, it should be that tragedy often provides the most fertile creative ground. Lanegan often seems like one of rock’s unheralded tradegians. His music is rarely subtle in and of itself, but is able to explore different emotional shades that, in other hands, might seem to be indistinguishable. There are mis-steps on Blues Funeral, as there are with most of his output, but there are enough moments present in which Lanegan plays upon his strengths that the album stands as a compelling example of the things which he can do right.
