Album of the Month: Field Songs - Mark Lanegan
Mark Lanegan was a bonafide master of dark, haunting folk music. Field Songs is strongly emotional, eschewing pain and telling a very real story of Lanegan's journey of overcoming drug abuse and homelessness. But what makes this special in his discography, is just how delicate the instrumentation is. Field Songs is full of light keyboards, soft acoustic guitar, plunky piano, and nary a proper grunge-y riff in the whole of it. A quiet menagerie to accompany his whiskey-fueled, gravel-and-ashes voice.
Field Songs is a grower of an album, I wouldn't pick out many standout tracks as it instead has something special about each track. A smattering of excellent moments spread across the whole track list. The transition from "No Easy Action" to "Miracle" is entrancing, and Lanegan's vocals after the acoustic solo on "Don't Forget Me" are ferocious and biting. The beginning of "Blues for D" is especially haunting, with droning keyboard, a cyclic guitar pattern, and airy- almost floating- piano.
Many of the songs on the album cover themes relating to his lifelong struggles with alcohol and heroin, and his homelessness following the Screaming Trees' dissolution in 1997. Opener "One Way Street" is a fairly apparent metaphor for his alcoholism. Having been an addict from the age of 12 he details that "everywhere I've been there's a well that howls my name"; His addiction has followed him everywhere he's gone. And the closer "Fix" is a double-entendre for both the broken state that heroin has left him in, and his lifelong need for a fix to ignore it all.
Lanegan's voice in-and-of itself is a complex balance of characteristics. From his time with Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age it couldn't ever be forgotten that he can holler and belt his way through cacophonous instrumentals. But on this record Lanegan instead uses his immensely deep and depressing vocals to contrast with soft, lightly bluesy, folk rock instrumentation. His bite and aggression always boiling under the surface, but never showing its face.
With this I mean to demonstrate an essential characteristic of this album specifically. Mark Lanegan is not typically the kind of vocalist whose voice dominates the song, his low growl is at its absolute best complemented by suitably reflective instrumentation. And Field Songs does this better than maybe any of his other records. It's commanding and a bit eccentric, instrumentally soft, melodically pleasant, and yet thematically harsh.
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