Review Summary: We came to walk on this boulevard love
Don't care where we're goin'
As the Seattle Sound petered out, giving way to its washed-out radio rock whoreson, I don’t think anyone could have predicted that the one Washington descendent who’d age most elegantly through the cull, would be Mark Lanegan, the junkie grouch of grunge’s stout flower children, Screaming Trees.
“Scraps at Midnight,” released in the summer of 1998 by Martin Mills’ Beggars Banquet and indie pioneers turned indie conglomerates Sub-Pop, was Lanegan’s third solo record, and the first released under the sure knowledge that the Trees’ troubled hiatus would be an indefinite one.
Writing a retrospective review of Lanegan’s halcyon days as a solo artist obliges you to take a quick look at where his career stands at the moment, and barring the countless alliances he’s struck with other musicians over the years, his electronica-informed output since 2004’s “Bubblegum” has been a much more uneven endeavor.
After spending close to fifteen years in relative obscurity, intermittently reappearing to remind you just how empyreal his voice is, Lanegan has now put out four records in five years, peppering that turnout with his usually-varied array of cameos. This period has also seen him change his sound drastically, forgoing acoustic lines bumped-up by mild electric dissonance, for a more digital submission.
Facing this recent prolific streak, it’s easy to forget how quietly sublime Lanegan’s early records were, or how he would sit on them for years, tweaking small subtleties endlessly, finally releasing small unostentatious collections of beatific elegies that made your chest tighten.
Even if the records do bear his name, Lanegan has never been a solo artist in the proper sense. His co-pilot in the studio has usually dictated what aesthetic niche the music would fall into, with Lanegan’s vocals orbiting that sound, rather than spurring it on. If Josh Homme made “Bubblegum” sound like an able answer to the vision of a Lanegan-fronted Queens, and Greg Dulli put his vocals through the indie ringer, then Alain Johannes showed everyone how Joy Division would sound when sieved through a decidedly more blue-collar filter.
“Scraps at Midnight” is the end-result of Lanegan’s most steadfast and like-minded collaborator; Mike Johnson. Known mostly as the poor sap who’d replaced Lou Barlow during Dinosaur Jr.’s humdrum run through the late 90’s, Johnson, more than any other Lanegan cohort, succeeded at building songs around the Night Porter’s voice, rather than letting him usurp a pre-written melody.
Even the loudest moments of “Scraps,” like the opening charge of “Hospital Roll Call” or the honky-tonk percussion of “Stay,” feel anemic here, coated in vaporous ambience, allowing Lanegan to guide the listener through the songs’ mood swings. Johnson handled co-production and –writing on Lanegan’s first five releases, navigating him through gracile Southern Gothic paeans, dimly-lit death dirges and the willowy Americana he would come to be known for, all of those styles converging in the arguable zenith of Lanegan’s solo career, “Field Songs.”
The gaunt soloing on “Hospital Roll Call,” and muted distortion on the stunning “Hotel” are visible tokens of how important Mike Johnson’s contributions were to Lanegan’s catalogue, and make his absence all the more stark in the outwash of the battering ram-like production that Alain Johannes has brought to the singer’s latter-day releases, that while more than capable, lacks nuance. However formidable his voice remains to be, it’s lost the youthful robustness which would allow him to rise above the roiling instrumentals, and it is audibly evident on “Blues Funeral” and “Phantom Radio,” that his vocals were artificially lifted in the mix. British trip-hop outfit Soulsavers, who Lanegan cut two albums’ worth of material with in the mid-2000’s, were much more adept at phasing that baritone into their synthetic fits, without making it all sound like a slapdash cut-and-paste job.
“Scraps” first half is the superior set of songs, making the album a bit top-heavy. After the twitchy yelp of “Hospital Roll Call,” the album settles into a steady run of short radiant pieces that skirt the low end of mid-tempo. For a record that runs just under forty minutes, there are troves of beauty to find here. “Bell Black Ocean” is a gorgeous Sinatra-esque piano ballad about love’s abandon, and “Last One in the World” is a touching requiem to Lanegan’s fellow Seattler and grunge casualty, Layne Staley. The second quintet of songs on “Scraps” is slightly patchier, with “Wheels” and “Day and Night” rehashing the same acoustic melody, punctuated by a sax and harmonica respectively. “Praying Ground’s” opening line of ‘Not feeling any pain’ is mawkish even by Lanegan’s ghoulish lyrical standards., but “Waiting on a Train” is all bluegrass urgency, with Johnson throwing some expert country picking to complement Lanegan’s confessionals.
In ways, “Scraps” is the product of an artist settling into his own skin. For all of its hushed sensibility, it feels more pressing and fleshed-out than “Whiskey for the Holy Ghost,” which supposedly was recorded at the height of Lanegan’s heroin agitation. By the turn of the century, Lanegan would be on a hot streak, with a handful of critically-lauded albums under his belt, and a semi-permanent stint in Queens of the Stone Age, one of rock music’s last-standing gatekeepers. But these songs seem a particularly precious period of his career, the modest mid-road of a man letting go of past grievances, and perhaps for the first time, looking ahead with a scrap of hope.
