Mark Lanegan and Tex Perkins are unacknowledged soulmates. It’s easy seeing them clinking hi-balls full of whiskey in a backwater bar someplace. They’re both sought-after hard rockin’ blues men, forever winding through bands they’ve started. What’ll ultimately draw them together is their mutual love of covers.
Lanegan and his ole acoustic tackle an eclectic range of genres and eras, from newcomer Chelsea Wolfe to recently departed crooner superstar Andy Williams. He loves Andy Williams. Three of his lesser-known cuts feature on this record, the standout being Solitaire. It’s a rendition withered of any Williams’ original schmaltz.
He chews up Frank Sinatra’s Pretty Colors, peals of guitar dangling over Lanegan’s cracked voice, limitless with melancholy. Frank’s daughter Nancy features, too. Faithful to the Spaghetti Western feel of the original, You Only Live Twice twists with unsettling David Lynchian moods. John Cale’s I’m Not The Loving Kind is more tribute than cover, preserved in all its powder blue bellbottomed glory.
Lanegan lends careworn pipes to Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ Brompton Oratory, and surprisingly Hall & Oates’ She’s Gone. Such is Lanegan’s vulnerability in his voice and hands as he plays, it feels she’s taken your soul with her. A variation on Mack the Knife upends the original’s bop and brightness, dragging it down to its Brechtian murder ballad origins. When “those in darkness drop from sight” Lanegan intones, you know they’re never coming back.
Lanegan might have intended a cover album, but really, he’s released a record all his own.
BY TOM VALCANIS
Best track:Mack the Knife
If You Like These, You’ll Like This: Duke Garwood, Soulsavers, the bits of Queens Of The Stone Age he’s on
In a word: Lonesome
