Mark Lanegan
Imitations

Exactly fourteen years after "I'll Take Care of You", a collection of reinterpretations of old American tracks, Mark Lanegan tries again with "Imitations", this time expanding the selection to include less dated songs (see "Flatlands" by Californian Chelsea Wolfe), 'disturbing' close friendships (Greg Dulli) and true legends of international music from the Sinatra family to John Cale, passing through Nick Cave. "Imitations": the name alone already explains everything and so does the cover. The reference to that small marble masterpiece of "I'll Take Care of You" is immediately evident for those who loved it as much as I did..

The 'classy bastard', as NME calls him, tries once more then. He conquers the soul with strokes of melancholic folk caresses chained together by that unavoidable common thread which is the famed 'stranger' called love, and he does it as only he can: getting under your skin like an intense shiver, burning through your veins, boiling in your heart and coming out like a thick puff of smoke. That unmistakable smoke that thickens his very deep and cavernous voice, warm, infinite, and sad. Now, we know that for the more skeptical, an album of covers per se may seem the last step on a path where an artist goes to flounder when they have little to say. But we know it’s not like that, and Lanegan has given us proof upon proof. Publishing three albums over the last biennium, 2012/2013 (all different from each other) is already no small feat, achieving the results he obtained, and managing to imprint the depth and beauty they possess is increasingly rare in a period of musical bulimia and superficiality like this.

''Imitations" cradles you, caresses you, sometimes hits you like a punch in the face and torments your soul with grace and sadness. Gray ballads ("Lonely Street", "Solitaire"), disillusioned, and sacred declarations of love ("I'm Not the Loving Kind", "Pretty Colours", and "Brompton Oratory", which alone shines with a splendid light), famous torch songs of old times ("You Only Live Twice"): there is all the sentiment lost in sixty years of love stories. You put it on, and it almost feels like watching your elders dance tightly cheek to cheek in an empty hall at the dawn of a melancholic autumn, lost in the past ("Autumn Leaves") among the yellow pages of an infinite love that you too would like to replicate and live forever.

The deep emotion that Mark Lanegan pours into each reinterpretation of this collection of covers, whether he transforms "She's Gone" by Vern Gosdin into a spiritual roots or "You Only Live Twice" by Nancy Sinatra into a skeletal folk ballad; whether he tackles, singing in French, the gloomy 'funerary elegy of love' by Gerard Manset or winks at the most famous crooners of the past in the swing rendition of "Mack the Knife" by Kurt Weill with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht, a popular piece made famous in the '50s by Louis Armstrong and Bobby Darin's interpretations), truly does good to the heart. It heals and torments at the same time, like the ambivalence of everything beautiful that on one hand elevates you and on the other throws you down into the deepest shadow of every nightmare (''Deepest Shade'').

Losing oneself is easy, and seeing the light at the end of oneself is less so. For now, I can only play 'Imitations' at full volume, not neglecting anything, no arrangement, no nuance, and if Lanegan will manage to soothe every pain this time as well, it will only be because nowhere on the face of the earth is there anyone with a voice so powerful and magnificent as to make you forget all your troubles.