Mark Lanegan Band - Phantom Radio

A man never far from a surprise change of direction, Lanegan focuses the latest album from the Mark Lanegan Band around his love of krautrock and British post-punk. The whiskey-soaked blues is dialled back slightly and replaced with all manner of keyboard tones from relatively cheerful to icily bleak and around these hang odd curios seeping in from other genres. Sitting neatly in the middle of ‘Phantom Radio’, ‘Seventh Day’ is a perfect example of this, marrying an almost extinct staple of an achingly seventies funk bassline to the stabbing strings of turn-of-the-millenium Moby. From that point the track rides briefly on a wave of sitar-like euphoria before bubbling into the brittle eighties synth of any track from ‘Pretty Hate Machine’.

Lanegan’s voice has an undeniable quality and resonates with a feeling of deep meaning. Every word is somehow unavoidable, as if they may be the last you ever hear, and no matter in what tone the word is delivered it’s incredibly convincing. Album opener ‘Harvest Home’ sets the plain-spoken fatalistic tone, with its haunting but resigned “Nothing to say, the sky so grey - I reap, I sew, my harvest, my home”. The use of religious imagery is prominent and only adds to an album that seems to abandon notions of era and style, to instead stand as a monolith in the artist’s own impressive timeline.

While you can safely rely on one of the best voices put to record in the last decade or so, it’s the use of synths that provides the real surprises on ‘Phantom Radio’. That includes twinkling nods to Cold Cave on ‘Floor of the Ocean’, along with spells that sit adjacent to late-Horrors and even some Primal Scream style hyperactive chaos. Closer ‘Death Trip To Tulsa’ leaves a final mark, in the shape of an impossibly catchy synth line married into the hazy blues of the ‘Bubblegum’ era.

This far into his career Mark Lanegan was unlikely to start making albums that are any less than engaging, but it’s still testament to his creativity and love of his art that ‘Phantom Radio’ is such a successful departure from bluesy rock and roll. While from the distance it may seem fairly easy to pin adornments onto a vocal performance that reliable, the embellishments Lanegan picks out show a fearless ambition and an unshakeable understanding of all he surveys. He’s seen a lot and he’s been to a lot of places but this proves there’s not just mileage in him still, but that he’s going to lead us many more places yet - from the top of Mark Lanegan’s mountain you can see everything.

Tags: Mark Lanegan Band, Reviews, Album Reviews