Mark Lanegan
Straight Songs Of Sorrow

It is sad to review what we know to be the last album of Mark Lanegan, who died at the age of 57 on the morning of February 22, 2022, in his home in Killarney, Ireland. And, despite everything, no one expected his death. At least, I didn't expect it. Not when Mark, a veteran of '90s Grunge who had lived on the edge of the abyss, cradled in the arms of death due to his addictions, had for about twenty years embarked on a more intimate and, above all, sober path compared to the times with the Screaming Trees and the beginnings of his solo career. Not when Mark had found the apparent security of a life without excesses.

Straight Songs Of Sorrow is the tale of Mark Lanegan’s descent into the inferno and back, as he went down there searching for the years of his youth and, as if he had a premonition, he delivered this album to us, an artistic and life testament as appropriate as ever because it's haunted by the demons he had managed to confine to the realm of memories and that he evokes again, spitting them out along with the words through his tar-coated voice, composing a sort of personal “in memoriam,” as if he felt the need to settle accounts with the past once and for all. The circle closes. The ghosts can finally leave on furlough.

Straight Songs Of Sorrow is, therefore, populated by those demons who patiently await Dark Mark from the times of his toxic Seattle, from when in “Hospital Roll Call,” he sang the sole word constituting the text, sixteen, et cetera, the number of the hospital room where he was admitted to detox. Those demons that have been awakened by Lanegan's autobiography, titled Sing Backwards And Weep, which resembles a Bukowski novel, a chronicle of a life overwhelmed by a river of whiskey and heroin. A drama told with raw realism which, however, did not have a cathartic effect but opened a Pandora's box full of pain and misery as Mark himself said. And the album draws a mournful poetry from the book. It is the musical narration of a conduct devoted to self-destruction that tells of excesses and falls, bitterness and fervor, defeat and redemption. A narration in which Lanegan is aided by trusty collaborators, such as his friend Greg Dulli (Gutter Twins, Afghan Whigs, and Twilight Singers), or former Led Zeppelin John Paul Jones, Adrian Utley of Portishead, and Warren Ellis of Nick Cave's Bad Seeds.

And do not be fooled by the electronic sounds, by the video game effects that surface here and there. The music on this album is Blues. Indeed, it is somber, dark, and tragic Folk-Blues. And it couldn't be otherwise. The themes addressed, painful and lethal, can only take shape in the Blues that finds its form both in the sinister frontier ballads and in the digital sequences.

Not everything is perfectly focused, like the opening of “I Wouldn’t Want To Say” with its Space Invaders sounds, “Churchbells Ghosts” too monotonous or “Internal Hourglass Discussion” also rather dull, which seem to be just sketched ideas. Nevertheless, Straight Songs Of Sorrow is an album of great value, which is appreciated slowly. Despite the simplicity of the compositional patterns and arrangements, it is an album that needs to be sipped and savored in peace. An album endowed with excellent songs, like the bittersweet folk of “Apples From a Tree” and “The Game of Love,” an unconventional ballad sung with his wife Shelley Brien, concerning the light and shadow of their marital relationship. “Ketamine” is one of the most beautiful and dark tracks on the album with its limping blues gait and mournful singing. But the album's peaks are reached with the subsequent “Bleed All Over,” “Stockholm City Blues,” and “Skeleton Key.” The first, although it is a twilight composition, has an irresistible rhythm and a refrain so catchy it wouldn't be out of place on a dancefloor, and its lyrics could summarize the entire meaning of the album. “Baby, baby, baby/Don’t you say it’s over, yeah/I never wanted to/Baby, baby, baby/I’ma bleed all over, yeah/That’s what it’s comin’ to”. “Stockholm City Blues” is, instead, a suffering and gothic piece, typically American and traditional, centered as it is on an arpeggio of acoustic guitar accompanied by violin and accordion, where Mark relives his days as an aimless addict. “Than I thank my God because I prayed for it/I went to my knees when the medicine hit”. “Skeleton Key,” the single extracted from the album, is sensual and enveloping, dark and warm like a womb from which to be reborn naked, stripped of any frills, purified, and redeemed after plummeting into the void. “I've lost enough to know when I am beaten”. The dramatic “Daylight in the Nocturnal House” and “Ballad of a Dying Rover” speak of addiction and seek a cure for the wounds of the soul.

Straight Songs Of Sorrow sings of pain and loss, stringing a rosary of prayers and regrets, digging deep into misery, reconnecting the threads of a devastating past, oscillating between synthesizers and tradition, confirming Lanegan as one of the great contemporary American songwriters, on par with Dylan and Cash.

At the end of so much despair, however, we find the purifying invocation of "Eden Lost And Found," proclaimed like a Spiritual with organ background and string section. “Daylight is comin', Daylight's callin' me”. The final track that has the power to make Straight Songs Of Sorrow a chilling journey but also the account of a comeback. The abyss and the redemption. Straight songs of sorrow.