The passage of time has been kind to Mark Lanegan. Since before the demise of his first band Screaming Trees in 2000, Lanegan has kept up a breakneck pace, juggling between solo albums and a string of high-profile collaborations. Back in ’92, when Screaming Trees scored hits with “Dollar Bill” and “Nearly Lost You,” you’d never have imagined that same singer making himself at home one day beside Martina Topley-Bird and Warpaint on a cover of the xx’s “Crystalised.” Lanegan’s voice doesn’t sound remotely out of place on the dance-remix versions either, which suggests that it wasn’t just moxie and elbow grease that prevented him from becoming a grunge/alternative fossil.
Against the electronic thump of his own 2012 solo effort Blues Funeral, for example, Lanegan sounded vital and renewed. Strangely, programmed beats alienate him somewhat on Gargoyle, his 10th solo album and the latest example of how Lanegan sometimes undersells his own natural abilities. As leathery as his voice is, it’s actually a rather pliable instrument. So it’s puzzling that he so often sticks to his lower register as if stuck in an eternal Leonard Cohen afterworld. Ironically, Lanegan sounded more like a musician just being himself in Screaming Trees. Regardless of how well his work with them has aged, there’s no questioning its identity.
By contrast, Gargoyle makes you wish Lanegan had studied Glenn Danzig’s way of emulating Roy Orbison without losing his own personality in the process. Of course, the lyrics don’t help. Lanegan continues to insist on using buzzwords straight out of the film-noir/pulp fiction/goth canon. He might have been able to breathe new life into those forms—as he did on Blues Funeral and elsewhere—but he resorts instead to textbook pictures of darkness. “And though my soul is not worth saving,” he sings on “Old Swan,” “my mistress and my queen/Your spirit is larger than my sin.”
Before you even get to the verses themselves, song titles like “Death’s Head Tattoo,” “Nocturne,” and “Drunk on Destruction” make you wonder whether Lanegan’s just playing a character the whole time. That alone wouldn’t be a bad thing—given the actual range of his vocal inflection, Lanegan is capable of playing the role of compelling anti-hero. Instead, his stylized lexicon of midnights and devils and mamas lands him closer to the singer-songwriter equivalent of Sam Spade. Meanwhile, returning Blues Funeral producer/multi-instrumentalist Alain Johannes and guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Rob Marshall opt for programming that miscasts Lanegan as a late-’90s alterna-rocker who’s just discovered techno. We already know that’s not the case.
At times, Gargoyle casts off its own shackles. On “Beehive,” Marshall’s exuberant guitars lift Lanegan out of his doldrums. The change in temperament is so welcome (imagine taking Dostoyevsky to a summer barbecue) it’s easy to overlook the fact that the song is basically a U2 tribute. On “Blue Blue Sea,” a billowing keyboard loop gives Lanegan room to remind us of why he outlasted the likes of Gavin Rossdale. But then, Lanegan reminds us of this album’s main issue when he sings of a “gargoyle, perched on gothic spire.”
The analogy couldn’t be any more fitting, but in case you didn’t get the point there’s a wrought-iron gate on the album cover. Perhaps Lanegan wasn’t conscious of the message he was sending, but like a gargoyle making faces to fend off intrusion, Lanegan all too often prevents the audience from seeing the artist that lives behind his dour exterior. Gargoyle is most engaging when it invites glimpses, however fleeting.
