Screaming Trees
Clairvoyance

THE REVIEW

It's a bit sad now to read on the CD reissues of Screaming Trees albums the sticker "featuring Mark Lanegan from Queens of the Stone Age." Comparatively, it feels a bit like finding the label "With John Paul Jones from Them Crooked Vultures" on the cover of Led Zeppelin III. It's a pity that Screaming Trees are generally so underappreciated. I myself discovered them some time ago purely by chance here on DeBaser while searching for some grunge bands beyond the usual well-known names.

Initially, they didn't capture me, but after a couple of years, revisiting the album, I realized I was dealing with a product of true quality, the result of a group that undoubtedly ranks among the best rock specimens confusingly labeled as grunge.
The grunge label, in which Screaming Trees, having formed already in 1985, appear as one of the earliest examples. The Washington state group debuted the same year with the EP "Other Worlds," which already showed their unique style of blending garage rock with psychedelic elements. "Clairvoyance," from 1986, is their first full-length.
A raw and perhaps immature album, but much less trivial than it might seem. The strictly rock component of the album consists of typically grunge clattering, understood as impetuous hard rock with punk and metal elements. Contributing to this is the sparse production, which however does not disturb the enjoyability of the album.

An essential element of the album is the psychedelia, expressed through the keyboards in "The Turning" and "You Tell Me All These Things", the hallucinogenic choirs in "Orange Airplane", and especially in the expert melodic insertions achieved through catchy riffs and broad and flavorful guitar solos and in the phenomenal voice of Mark Lanegan, which pairs well with the punk fierceness of bass and drums. For as raw and immature as "Clairvoyance" may be, its different components blend perfectly, giving the album great depth. The heterogeneity of the whole is also good: the calm and drunken "Standing on the Edge", the almost British heavy metal flavor of "Forever", the cheerful "Seeing and Believin", the explosive finale of "Lonely Girl".

An album that, with all its objective quality, its historical value, and its simple beauty, you end up loving. Lovers of rock that is hard but not ignorant should not miss out on this rare gem.