[Today: Mark Lanegan's darkest hour...]
The music that would come to be known as grunge exploded onto the scene in early 1992 with the unexpected multi-platinum success of Nirvana’s Nevermind and Pearl Jam’s Ten. But by 1994, grunge was already feeling played out and overexposed, with fashion models sporting flannel on Paris runways, Eddie Vedder on the cover of Time and Newsweek, and the abominable movie Singles – Hollywood’s own weak take on Generation X and grunge.
As lead singer of the band Screaming Trees, Mark Lanegan lived very near the epicenter of the grunge explosion. His second solo album, Whiskey For The Holy Ghost, sounds like a condemned man’s dying prayer, and the cover shot – featuring a bible, a bottle of whiskey, and a crowded ashtray – captures the intense desperation of the music. If Lanegan fulfilled his role in Screaming Trees as a more traditional heavy rock screamer, here he invokes the darkest spirits of popular music: Blind Willie Johnson, Hank Williams, Jim Morrison, Skip Spence, Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Gary Higgins, and almost any other musician in the process of burning out and/or fading away.
Like the best blues, it’s hard to tell where Lanegan’s music ends and his life begins. He certainly didn’t intend the album as a post-mortem on the grunge experience, but the timing of this release (mere months before Kurt Cobain’s death) as well as its raw-as-an-open-nerve sound, positions it as the natural album to serve that function. If grunge had been afforded a funeral, this would have made an excellent soundtrack.
Fortunately, Whiskey For The Holy Ghost was just the first milestone in Lanegan’s post-grunge career. He would make one more album with Screaming Trees before striking out on his own, where he has become something of an elder statesman in indie circles. He’s released a number of fine solo albums and served as a part-time member of Queens Of The Stone Age, but for a few months in 1994, he sang like a beaten man at the end of his rope.
Listen: Carnival
5 June 2008 at 11:32 pm |
[...] pm… Mark Lanegan Band * Bubblegum – I never been any kind of Screaming Trees fan, but I think Mark Lanegan’s solo stuff is uniformly excellent. It’s got a doom-laden, frayed cloth quality that I just can’t [...]
10 January 2010 at 1:33 pm |
“Kingdoms Of Rain”, is my favourite.
Having said that, his talent is so great that Lanegan could sing the phone book and i’d be spellbound.
23 July 2010 at 3:26 pm |
[...] on hiatus for most of 2002 so that he could play drums on this album and the subsequent tour, and Mark Lanegan makes an excellent guest vocal appearance on ‘Hanging Tree’. QOTSA had released two [...]