Send "Mark Lanegan " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 If you value melody and visceral thrills as a listener, it must be weird to see critics engage with the latest Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen records as if they're park rangers describing protected national treasures-- they tend to speak solely in terms of topography, remarking upon jagged outcroppings and bottomless lodes of capital-t Truth hidden in those crevasses created by years of erosion from hard living and hard liquor. Me, I don't necessarily give growling old white men the presumption of wisdom. Point being that even though Mark Lanegan will be all but grandfathered into that Hall of Fame in 20 years and will look swarthy in men's magazines proclaiming Blues Funeral to be the testosterone-boosting antidote to wimpy indie rock and fashionista hip-hop, he has every bit the obligation to avoid cliché and actually come up with good songs as everybody else. Can an album named Blues Funeral, of all things, actually make good on that?Unfortunately, it's closer to something like Machete, where the majority of the pleasure was derived from seeing grizzled and badass charcter actor Danny Trejo doing grizzled and badass things in a lead role, plot or character development be damned. But then again, that voice. It really is something to behold-- while the aforementioned greats have vocals that are nearly utilitarian in function, worn down to an essentialist nub, Lanegan's is as lustrous, supple, and thoroughly American as a well-oiled baseball mitt. When given the proper material-- which in the past has often come from wisely chosen collaborators such as Greg Dulli, Isobel Campbell, Josh Homme, and PJ Harvey-- the results are almost invariably powerful on a sheer physical level. Do lyrics like, "With piranha teeth/ I've been dreamin' of you," sound any less ridiculous than they look on paper? Not really, but it's the impossibly thick riffs and Jack Irons' feral drumming that drives "The Gravedigger's Song" toward Queens of the Stone Age's hot zone between the monster-truck muscle and race-car seduction....full text |
| Guardian |
| The first Mark Lanegan Band album since 2004 (he's been busy with Soulsavers, the Gutter Twins and Isobel Campbell) contains no great shocks: for the most part, this is bluesy, lugubrious, modernish rock, elevated by Lanegan's remarkable gravel-pit of a voice. Opener The Gravedigger's Song is propelled by the thick throb of its bassline and shuffly electronic drums, but that voice is inevitably the focus. Mixed up high, it is as striking – overbearing, even – as ever, and is, it must be said, the harbinger of many lyrical cliches. His tears are liquor, listeners, and he's drunk himself sick. Oh Lord, do you hear the tolling bells, something about razor blades and electric chairs, and so on. Still, the tunes are there – Quiver Syndrome could be a great late-period Screaming Trees song, and Gray Goes Black is a keen, sleek pop-rocker – but running close to a full hour, this can feel like a long funeral....full text |
| Prefixmag |
| Mark Lanegan picked the perfect time to come back with an album. Few voices are better suited to soundtrack the death throes of a crumbling empire, and that’s precisely – if sometimes indirectly – what Blues Funeral is about: navigating desperate situations and desolate landscapes. Rihanna might have found love in a hopeless place; Lanegan’s hit a dead end. On the dogged “Phantasmagoria Blues,” he drawls, “I thought I’d rule like Charlemagne/ But I’ve become corrupt/ Now I crawl the promenade/ To fill my empty cup.” Shit, dude -- talk about giving Cormac McCarthy a run for his money. I’ve always vastly preferred Lanegan’s take on blues and folk to his grungier early days, because overblown arrangements just get in the way of his voice. Fittingly, on Funeral’s best tracks the production is downright skeletal; Lanegan’s inflection providing all the body and blood it needs. The bassline propping up leadoff track “The Gravedigger’s Song” sounds like someone scrambling to climb out of a hole, anxious and urgent, the perfect complement to a song about digging too deep into an obsession. Even the more robust tracks sound emaciated, the rhythm mixed high, the backing curling into place around it. The technique works especially well on “Ode to Sad Disco,” where the propulsive 2/4 beat makes a sturdy structure for Lanegan’s voice and snaky string arrangement tweaked to sound like hi-hats. Funeral’s songs are recognizably “blues” in that they employ minor keys and make liberal use of pentatonic scales, but the “blues material” has been adapted for a modern age. In this world, bums liken themselves to fallen, storied kings and Jesus’ coming gets compared to a flight through St. Louis. And on the excellent “Harborview Hospital,” Lanegan listens to a vaunted, ethereal choir that can’t hear him, using that simple juxtaposition as a launch pad to make a crushing point about the chasms that exist in society, how remote and unreachable most physical property and emotional collateral is to most people. ...full text |
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