silence kit #16

Mark Lanegan
Field Songs [Beggars Banquet, 2001]

I always love the old truism John Huston uttered in the Roman Polanski film Chinatown that politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough. Same goes with someone like Mark Lanegan, who has flew under the radar somewhat but has aged in a rather respectable fashion notwithstanding your opinion on his collaborations with the likes of Queens of the Stone Age, Greg Dulli and Isobel Campbell. Dude’s already done six thoroughly solid solo albums under his belt after all. Field Songs (2001), his fifth, reminds me a lot of Tom Waits. Lanegan’s misprojected romanticism is given a particularly warm, country-blues kind of vibes on this album – the comfortingly weird chill you get from hearing these Field Songs is of someone trying to numb himself from encounters with dirty fiends and cannibal appetites. The way his ragged voice and swarthy instrumentations subsume into the whiskey-soaked ballads “Pill Hill Serenade” and “Kimiko’s Dream House”, the latter his cover of a song by the late Jeffrey Lee Pierce of The Gun Club, really gets under my skin, Lanegan’s voice moving bewildering like a cheapjack anaesthetist doing his thing. But these days I think I prefer natural sleep, if possible.