If you value melody and visceral thrills as a listener, it must be weird to see critics engage with the latest Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen records as if they're park rangers describing protected national treasures-- they tend to speak solely in terms of topography, remarking upon jagged outcroppings and bottomless lodes of capital-t Truth hidden in those crevasses created by years of erosion from hard living and hard liquor. Me, I don't necessarily give growling old white men the presumption of wisdom. Point being that even though Mark Lanegan will be all but grandfathered into that Hall of Fame in 20 years and will look swarthy in men's magazines proclaiming Blues Funeral to be the testosterone-boosting antidote to wimpy indie rock and fashionista hip-hop, he has every bit the obligation to avoid cliché and actually come up with good songs as everybody else. Can an album named Blues Funeral, of all things, actually make good on that?
Unfortunately, it's closer to something like Machete, where the majority of the pleasure was derived from seeing grizzled and badass charcter actor Danny Trejo doing grizzled and badass things in a lead role, plot or character development be damned. But then again, that voice. It really is something to behold-- while the aforementioned greats have vocals that are nearly utilitarian in function, worn down to an essentialist nub, Lanegan's is as lustrous, supple, and thoroughly American as a well-oiled baseball mitt. When given the proper material-- which in the past has often come from wisely chosen collaborators such as Greg Dulli, Isobel Campbell, Josh Homme, and PJ Harvey-- the results are almost invariably powerful on a sheer physical level. Do lyrics like, "With piranha teeth/ I've been dreamin' of you," sound any less ridiculous than they look on paper? Not really, but it's the impossibly thick riffs and Jack Irons' feral drumming that drives "The Gravedigger's Song" toward Queens of the Stone Age's hot zone between the monster-truck muscle and race-car seduction.
Lanegan doesn't stay in there long. Based on title alone, it's tough to associate "Bleeding Muddy Water" with any word besides "turgid," but the six minutes of the song itself, much of which finds Lanegan leaning hard on a line like "loooooord, now the rain done come" without creating context for its payoff, is more than content to follow suit, becoming one of Blues Funeral's many dirges that simply drag. But even the more uptempo material is hamstrung by strangely dated production that makes it come off like one of those "genre bending" roots rock albums from 1999 that tried to incorporate electronica and hip-hop touches. As a result, Blues Funeral sounds adrift both sonically and lyrically, chippy drum machines and oozing synths backing Lanegan's verbal merry-go-round of rising suns, avenging gods, and pitiless oceans. Something like the crawling blooze of "St. Louis Elegy" should be hard as nails, and its chorus of, "If tears were liquor/ I'd have drunk myself sick," tries to get there. But it's an exemplary Lanegan lyric in how repetition reveals its inherent clumsiness rather than depth. And while mentions of whisky are never too far away from descriptions of Lanegan's output, amidst the pumped-up kick drums and soloing guitars that never stop once during "Riot in My House", you feel like some retired NFL coach is about to give you a lecture on the significance of widemouth cans and frost brew liners.
Though a mixed bag, Blues Funeral does have its moments: "Ode to Sad Disco" is ostensibly the furthest stretch for Lanegan, a chintzy New Romantic backing that immediately recalls Erasure's "Chains of Love" and flows easily where the similarly lengthy epics on Blues Funeral buckle under their own assumed weight. As a song, it's nothing amazing, but more important is the acknowledgement that it "works." Weirdly, the less overt the stunt casting, the more awkward it sounds: "Harborview Hospital" and "Deep Black Vanishing Train" have seemingly the most personal and poetic lyrics on Blues Funeral, but their dime-thin orchestral arrangements hew closer to Collective Soul's "Run" than resonance. And while "Quiver Syndrome" isn't too far away from the Brit Invasion bands that influenced Screaming Trees, it's the one time Lanegan is simply overwhelmed by the jet-setter production: Competing with disembodied female "ooh-oohs" and laser-light sound effects, Lanegan huffs, "The moon don't smile on Saturday's child/ Lyin' still in Elysian fields/ I don't know what the doctor he did/ Now I'm all day long with my body in bed," like a winded Lizard King, proof that surrealistic nonsense can become its own kind of cliché.
Lanegan recently gave an interview to the Quietus where he namedropped albums by the Bee Gees, Kraftwerk, Joy Division, and the Gun Club as lifelong influences-- while it humanizes Lanegan in a way his obtuse and daunting lyrics rarely attempt to, it also makes you wish he went even further on Blues Funeral, so it could risk spectacular failure rather than mild disappointment. Indeed, Blues Funeral isn't ever bad per se, or even unlistenable. But back on Screaming Trees' 1996 album Dust, Lanegan sang, "all along, I've been a traveler," and while he's done an often-admirable job of embodying that mission statement, the drifter isn't so compelling when they sound as directionless as he does here*.*
