IF THERE’S any musician out there currently writing and recording who you can say has absolutely lived it, that accolade must surely go to former Screaming Trees man Mark Lanegan.
His gravelly, seductive voice graces a body of work that never ceases to explore and which expands steadily.
And the latest chapter in Lanegan’s oeuvre comes in the shape of a darkwave remix of his most recent album, last year’s Somebody’s Knocking, that subterranean reworking having been undertaken by IYEARA: the project to be entitled Another Knock At The Door (IYEARA Remixes), which is due for release on August 21st.
Ahead of Another Knock At The Door, IYEARA have released the first fruits of their collaboration in the shape of the single “Playing Nero”, in which we find Lanegan “stone cold on the telephone”, now stretched out on the rack of the darkest, deep synthwave textures, all concrete and steel in the sickly cast of neon, instrumentation like some advancing machine, coming, slowly, for you. It’s a shadowed thrill.
It’s not the kinda song you would want to run into while taking a shortcut through that rundown industrial part of town.
If it’s possible – and the results certainly show it is – they take the sweet, stark monochrome beauty of the original, Mark Lanegan’s 11th solo album, and bring out a deeper industrial dubcore being that’s been waiting to be born: think Massive Attack’s “Inertia Creeps” under an advancing thunderhead.
Mark Lanegan Band’s Another Knock At The Door (IYEARA remixes) is out on August 21st. It is available to order here.
