“
Everyone has to leave their various heavens some time and Lanegan has obviously left one or two behind.
“
Everyone has to leave their various heavens some time and Lanegan has obviously left one or two behind.
The Lanegan Gang ride into town at a funereal pace, all black hats and neckerchiefs keeping the dust from their burning throats. They come whispering a tale of emptiness, hopelessness and opportunity slain. They aren’t happy bunnies, not that Lanegan or his desperate band have ever been put in the “Bouncy Love Monkeys of Joy” pigeon hole.
The piano player stutters into silence and even the smoke stops swirling for a second as the Saloon doors swing open. The Lanegan Boys are joined by the ripped petticoat vocals of Polly Harvey for “Hit The City”. They get the drinks in, Whisky all round. You can almost hear the weasely fellow in the round spectacles and incongruous bowler hat sneaking out the back door to go and warn the Sheriff.
They take a corner table and sit with their backs to the wall, talking loudly but laughing private, sneering, targeted, laughs. Drinking and going to the toilet in suspicious groups of three and four; but you can only take so much drugs and Whisky……
One minute they sing a line of Nancy and Lee’s “Jackson”. The next it’s “Methamphetamine Blues” and they’re where they want to be.
A filthy, filthy blues it is too, “rollin’ just to keep on rollin/ I don’t wanna leave this heaven so soon'”.
Everyone has to leave their various heavens some time and Lanegan has obviously left one or two behind. A melancholy drunk, with a library of sadness to read from, squinting with one focussing eye through dim, brown light.
He goes outside for some warm night air. The occasional whiff of hope that drifts by gets choked on dusty gusts. Polly comes to help him through “Bombed” and understands his sleepy rhyme and reasons. Izzy Stradlin and Duff McKagan roll out of the saloon and join them on the porch for “Strange Religion,” a textured, black and blue country number but it only ever threatens to light a fire and they go back inside where it all kicks off.
“Sideways in Reverse” blasts out on eleven. Chairs are broken over Peter and the Test Tube Babies chord patterns. Amplifiers are thrown, crushing card tables, sending Whisky and chips flying. Guitars strafe the bar,showering the prostrate barman with scything shards of glass and streams of ancient throat-burn.
Lanegan and Harvey then pick through the debris like Tarantino heroes, all psychotic love and pain in “Come to Me”. The Sheriff gathers his posse silently in the shadows at the end of the street. They creep through alleyways and take up positions behind barrels and water butts and on the roofs of the buildings opposite, surrounding the saloon. The tension rises. “Can’t Come Down” is possibly the most menacing song on the album, knee deep in dusty despair and taut angst. Guitar, noise and feedback form and then drip slowly like sweat on Lanegan’s fevered brow.
More tumbleweed loneliness rolls across the scarred soundscape, lethargic and foreboding. The Lanegan Gang prepare themselves for yet another skirmish. Loading rifles and 45’s, turning up tables and smashing a few of the small paned windows for a clear sight. “Driving Death Valley Blues” is a deafening, fuzzed out, shoot out with Lanegan picking off the good guys through a haze of bullets and splinters. Men fall from rooftops to the pounding beats, bass and deadly surging guitars, while others clutch bursting guts and fall face down in the dirt.
Despite the mayhem and more than enough sorrow for the misery mongers among us, it’s Lanegan who bleeds the most on this fine, dark album. He and his outlaw in-laws saddle up and ride out with their backs to the rising smoke and the falling darkness. Someday he might return. We’ll be waiting.
Words: Simon Reed