Creature With The Atom Brain - The Birds Fly Low

Does Mark Lanegan need a passport? Or does he just arrive at the border of whatever country he’s visiting, growl at the unfortunate guard and get immediately allowed through on account of being so clearly Mark Lanegan?

When he turns up here, and it’s only for one song, his distinctiveness and his gravitas are such that ‘The Birds Fly Low’, the third full-length release from Belgium’s Creature With The Atom Brain, morphs into a Mark Lanegan record. Following his brief cameo you spend then next seven songs wondering if he will reappear. Which is frightening. If Mark Lanegan is hanging around, you want him to show himself, not skulk around in the shadows. That’s the kind of thing that’ll keep you up at night.

Of course that impression isn’t hurt by a couple of facts. First, the track on which he appears - ‘Black Rider Run’ - is the best here, all stuttering beats and choppy guitars, and second, large swathes of the rest of the album sounds pretty appropriate to house an escaped Lanegan. Creeping, stoner-rock with a thousand-yard stare and a healthy dose of something occult. It puts you in mind of both his recent solo work and Queens Of The Stone Age circa ‘Lullabies To Paralyze’.

Actually before that sets in, the very first things that are thrown are some good old-fashioned Zeppelin-like poses. ‘Hit The Sky’ lopes along with a bluesy, psychedelic strut, to such an extent that you really wouldn’t be surprised to hear it had come from a land of ice and snow. More broadly than that there’s a practiced looseness to the whole album, which makes ‘The Birds Fly Low’ seem like a relaxed session between players, songs sliding together with little pause to reset the metronome.

But as you might expect from a band whose name is taken from a Roky Erickson (founding member of 13th Floor Elevators) track, there are some odder jolts. There’s the dubby bounce, pseudo-horn blasts and Hammond organ of ‘The Beauty Of The Rain’, the folky wandering minstrel riff with which ‘Break Me Blue’ arrives and the berserk squall of ‘R-Frequency’. Not all of which work.

There can be a little too much noodle in their caboodle, as swirling relaxedness gives rise to hints of purposelessness. But when they’re good, as on the punchier ‘Nightlife’, then Creature With The Atom Brain’s grimy grooviness is somewhere closer to godliness. Freaky, and kind of fun.