Screaming Trees "Dust" (1996)
Screaming Trees and their dust-throated vocliast Mark Lanegan have
always drifted in and out of my orbit. I first heard the Screaming
Tress through their brilliant song "Nearly lost you" from the soundtrack
Cameron Crowe's grunge-centric film "Singles". Even though I loved
that song I didn't really think to check out any more of their music.
A few years later a friend was well into the Mark Lanegan band and I
listened to a couple of their albums but left it at that again. Then a
few years later, I saw Lanegan perform with the band the Soulsavers and a friend who is very much a Lanegan afficiando helped me
discover a lot more of his work (solo, with Belle & Sebastian's
Isobel Campbell, with Duke Garwood, Gutter Twins, Twilight
Singers...). Basically, sometimes I'm a slow learner.
Anyway, back to "Dust". The basic foundation of this album seems to be
the Beatles' Revolver and Rubber Soul albums, it has that mix of hard
rock with middle-eastern sounds and a wash of psychedelia. I guess
those sounds, mixed with a little more distortion and with Lanegan's
gravelly voice somehow manages to sound rock hard, the album is too good
to fob off as "just another grunge record".
Great songs with occasional touches of gospel backing vocals that seem
to signpost what was to come as far as Lanegan's work with the
Soulsavers goes.
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