A masterful companion piece to Mark Lanegan’s unflinching memoir Sing Backwards And Weep, which details painfully the singer’s tumultuous years with Screaming Trees and his struggles with addiction as a redneck waster in Seattle, Straight Songs Of Sorrow draws from the same deep well of emotional experience.
Greg Dulli, John Paul Jones and the Bad Seeds’ Warren Ellis are among the guests, but this is very much a personal project, as Lanegan exorcises his ghosts on songs built from nervy electronica and wounded ambience.
‘Is it my fate to be the last one standing?’, he asks on Skeleton Key, contemplating the premature deaths of great friends such as Kurt Cobain, Jeffrey Lee Pierce and Layne Staley.
He craves eternal slumber on Ballad Of A Dying Rover, and invokes the bad-trip drone of Lou Reed on Ketamine, before finally achieving release with Eden Lost And Found, his vision of daylight warmed by strings and a primitive organ riff.
