If you have no tolerance for revolving-door “recovering” addicts who feel compelled to chronicle, on record after record, every opium-drenched near-death vision and every groveling plea for salvation, ex-Screaming Trees vocalist Mark Lanegan is not for you. Yet despite his embrace of the dark side, Lanegan’s redemption will always be that ruined, impossibly deep, Johnny Cash of a voice and a keen instinct for musical drama.
Granted, on Bubblegum, Lanegan’s got a drug song (“Methamphetamine Blues”, whose cavernous clank sounds like Tom Waits covering Captain Beefheart), several religion songs (including the throbbing swamp-rocker “Can’t Come Down”), and a spine-chilling death song (the funereal, Nick Cave-like “When Your Number Is Up”; when Lanegan intones the line, “You smell the blood running warm,” your blood will run cold).
Yet the album, which is stocked with guest stars such as Josh Homme, Greg Dulli, Duff McKagan and PJ Harvey, actually finds Lanegan more inclined to assume the role of a chameleon than the Lizard King, and it scans like a series of one-act plays. One minute he’s a strutting rock lothario channeling Iggy Pop (“Sideways In Reverse”), the next he’s playing John Doe to Harvey’s Exene in a lo-fi punk-blues operetta (“Hit The City”). At one point he even slips into The Man In Black’s skin for a country-goth murder ballad (“Wedding Dress”, which throws in a lyric snippet of Cash’s “Jackson”).
The world probably doesn’t need any more wannabe nihilists romanticizing the view from the abyss. But maybe we do need those scarred poets who have seen the darkness and have divined how to conjure the light from it.