Mark Lanegan
Field Songs

THE FIELD MAN.

Fresh from his experience with the Screaming Trees during the so-called "grunge" period, after two splendid examples of modern folk-blues like Whiskey For The Holy Ghost and Scraps At Midnight (balancing between Cohen, Cash, Tim Hardin, and the Charon-like Waits), Mark Lanegan arrives at a definitive stylistic compendium with these "field songs." Field Songs is a collection of gritty and twilight tracks, torn from the arid land that feeds on darkness and light, angels and demons, damnation and mercy. An album of reflective gazes into the abyss, as rough as its author with a reserved and solitary profile. The dusty air of the old Frontier, New Mexico and Arizona, the Bible, the desperate and primitive stories of hobos in the Great Depression: boundless impressionistic frames of a no-compromise folksinger, painted by the wandering alcoholic mysticism of the songwriter from Ellensburg. The epic and severe thrust of Lanegan's baritone tone probes the uncertain crossroads between Good and Evil in the world, in a sound contaminated with tradition yet personal, disquieting. The production by John Agnello and the acoustic/electric notes from collaborators Ben Shepherd (formerly of Soundgarden), Mike Johnson, and Allen Davis carry the existential visions of Lanegan's mournful song in an even more intimate and timeless dimension, exalted by the careful minimalism of the arrangements.

"..When all is done and turned to dust, and insects nest inside my bones..I see I stagger in a daze outside my tent. No time for being alone..To bleed the hopeless singing of a round, that much we know to do. Before we go back underground..No easy action.."

The intro to One Way Street is a mental journey along sprawling distances among animal carcasses, cacti, and vultures. The psychedelic folk of No Easy Action exudes spectral landscapes and ancestral female choirs, in a wind of mellotron and wurlitzer, until it fades into the brief descending glimmer of the shadowy Miracle, which seeks catharsis and redemption within its gloomy imagery. A Hammond organ peeks into Pill Hill Serenade, a ballad of nostalgic and sweet simplicity. Acoustics and lap steel lull the sunny caresses of Kimiko's Dream House (written years earlier with the late friend Jeffrey Lee Pierce, another textbook irregular maudit), and pale synth reflections adorn She Done Too Much. The suspended and inexorable chords of Resurrection Song echo an old piece by Lanegan himself, the noted Kingdoms Of Rain, while the cold desolate flashes of Field Song crash into the distorted waves of the concluding tail. Anthological is the instrumental Blues For D, interwoven with desert suggestions, and the uneasy epilogue of Fix, a dazed rural folk pervaded by acid moods and sinister noises. It was May 2001, but Field Songs seems to have come from a lifetime ago. So much "classicism" is present. The asphalt on the road burns, burns damnably with sweat and ghosts. And perhaps that canteen of water and dirt, left to die among the stones and weeds of the desert, is not a mirage after all.

"..Let's walk down to the water. There's hyacinth in bloom..I spend my days loving you. I left these fields, because I never knew..To be a horse, to be a train.."