Mark Lanegan & Duke Garwood

With Animals heavenly

Second album by duo recorded in LA, Pasadena and Joshua Tree.

With Animals is an apposite title. It sounds like it was recorded deep in the parched Californian desert, with only fireflies, coyotes, burrowing rodents and nocturnal insect life for company. This is essentially raw, acoustic, heartfelt, a 21st-century blues, but heavily treated, clouded with atmospheres, immersed in dub, stretched across the skies, ground finely into the soil.

Save Me implicates the listener in its sound world; ‘Come now, midnight children, sing your own harmony.’ Songs like Feast To Famine may be lamentations of reduced personal circumstances, but perhaps resonate more widely, speaking of the difficulties of music making in present, straitened times. In Upon Doing Something Wrong, hopes turn to dust but rise in the hope of rebuilding something in the air. Spaceman is strangely retro-futuristic, like an astronaut who’s become detached from his craft on a mid-60s mission, wheeling about in space, singing in the old idiom of the blues. Finally, there’s a blessed moment of acoustic clarity with Desert Song, its lack of treatments implying the rising of the sun and the bright, blue prospect of hope and renewal.