Review Summary: I took a turn on this carousel, how long ago I never can tell..
2003 was a busy year for Mark Lanegan. He was coming off a prolonged tour of his stellar
Field Songs, intermittently scorching up the summer festival course with Queens of the Stone Age, and recording cameos left and right. Josh Homme was riding out a similarly hot streak, his
Songs for the Deaf establishing him as the last remaining spearhead of high-calibre hard rock music. So when the two entered into the studio to put down Lanegan’s
Bubblegum, with Master of Reality and Homme’s fellow desert punker Chris Goss, understandably, a mass outpour of material followed. The songs that didn’t end up on
Bubblegum’s already heaving track-list were packaged up as
Here Comes That Weird Chill, and released as a taster of things to come.
Here Comes That Weird Chill captures a moment when Lanegan’s burgeoning musical ambitions outside of folk-blues were being expertly curated and eased into the music, as opposed to crudely smashed on top like they would be in the years to follow.
Skeletal History is a burst of rough post-punk, spliced with synthetic percussion, punch-drunk ambience, guttural bass and flamenco guitar.
Wish You Were Here chugs and chimes and never loses its grim bite, and
Message to Mine’s wayward Chris Goss harmonies tenderize an otherwise swinging tune. It all works out beautifully.
He and Homme somehow make Captain Beefheart’s
Clear Spot filthier and more wicked; and all of Lanegan’s Southern Gothic lyrical tilts get summed up in a desperate, road-weary line from gorgeous piano dirge
Lexington Slow Down:
This stinking ***ing rain
Strangely, the ersatz title track and anchoring point of the EP is the weakest here (and among the weakest on
Bubblegum). A shrill squall of clunky industrial noise and hokey female back-chanting,
Methamphetamine Blues shoots for a morbid barn-burner, but ends up an unpleasant cross between desert blues and a Confederate Flag preacher. The song in its original and far-superior form, propelled by a piano and woozy Sonic Youth-esque guitars, was shelved for years, briefly appearing in 2009 indie flick
Cook County, before finally seeing official release as part of the
Houston demo collection from a few years ago.
Lanegan’s voice has always been the calling card of his work, and this EP is no exception. He’s fantastically on point all the way throughout, giddily languid, and audibly excited to be making loud music again after too-long a break. When grafted together with
Bubblegum and other ‘throwaway’ tracks from singles releases, the collective work comes together as a sinister obelisk, a product of cresting musicians reveling in how perfectly and easily everything is falling into place.
Here Comes That Weird Chill stands for an unequalled point in both Lanegan’s and Homme’s timelines, a moment of such creative glut, that their toss-offs were less B-sides and more songs that simply couldn’t fit onto a single disc.
