Screaming Trees
Invisible Lantern

"Better keep on going

It's the only thing I know

Oh Lord, it won't change

It won't change

It won't change

It won't change..." 

At the exact moment he uttered these lines, Mark Lanegan was something between Jim Morrison and Jeffrey Lee Pierce, disoriented amidst the dust of a desolate no man's land. He embodied the visionary street poetry of the former and the deep, incandescent Blues of the latter. He was rage and despair, depression and outburst. He stood before a microphone, but simultaneously sat behind the wheel of a car speeding aimlessly on the highway of a desert without cardinal points, the nearest city still hundreds and hundreds of miles away. Surprised by the night, shedding tears mixed with raindrops falling, the perception of time now annihilated by the image of the lane flowing, flowing, flowing... a day seems to last a million years, and the only thing to do is to KEEP GOING even knowing that nothing will change, and that "won't change" repeats obsessively like a phrase carved into the silence of a long dialogue with oneself - before the obsession turns into a cry, a piercing scream blending with Gary Lee Conner's guitar exploding in flashes of astral apocalyptic electricity.

And in the exact moment those notes scratched, the Screaming Trees were something "other", something that went irreparably BEYOND the raw uncertainty of "Clairvoyance" and the excellence merely hinted at, barely suggested in "Even If and Especially When". And Seattle was no longer just the city of the Supersonics nor the home of the greatest rock guitarist of all time, but was also the California of Blue Cheer, the Mojave evoked (and lived) in sounds by Thin White Rope, the drugged and jug-electrified Texas of the 13th Floor Elevators. It was all this together, and perhaps even more. "Grey Diamond Desert," the masterpiece of the present album in the humble opinion of yours truly, is its most perfect and powerful synthesis. The seeds of the most visceral and genuine garage-punk, sown by those who - in Seattle twenty years earlier - declared they preferred the taste of pure strychnine to water and wine, have now produced imposing if not abnormal creatures, tenacious creepers like the ivy clinging to the wall of "Ivy" ("Ivy on the wall, I know the way that you creep and crawl"), to the rhythm of a riff that enters and stamps itself into memory over an overflowing bass. Sounds as indelible as the frightening images evoked - the anthropomorphic hybrid of a girl/ivy with black hair overlapping crystal faces peering from the windowsill in "Lines & Circles," just as the smoke rings in "Smokerings" disperse into the air merging with the mist and howls of dogs resembling infernal beasts (reflections of Cerberus from "Hellhound On My Trail"...?). Superlative levels of writing, reality and dream intertwining without allowing one to comprehend precisely where one ends and the other begins.

The delirium and hypnosis of psychedelia mixed with a fury and roughness that belong only to punk: liters of acid electric vomit, slashes of guitars that tear ruthlessly, the wild wah-wah of an inimitable "Shadow Song," the perfection in two minutes (or slightly more) of "She Knows" and "Walk Through To This Side". There are no moments of weakness: the blood is unable to slow down, prey to a tension that is perhaps the same as that of Lanegan and the Conners during the recording days (constant frictions with producer/additional member Steve Fisk, but if it is true that masterpieces arise from the spark...). Listening to these 40/41 minutes through headphones is an experience I would be incapable of describing with other words, except to flash before your eyes the metallic cadences of the title-track (the solitude of a locked room, so anguishing while Mark sings the despair of not being able to escape the nightmares of one's own mind); the echoes of Ramblin' Jeffrey's "Carry On" that appear so clearly in "The Second I Awake", the paranoid punk of "Direction Of The Sun", the guitar and organ of "Even If". And the absolute Genius of composition in "Night Comes Creeping": when time slows down and the Blues matrix is revealed without any residual doubts, then with that Solo, one can truly abandon the mind and reason to their own fate.

If I have omitted any letters, it was the trembling of hands on the keyboard.