Electronic Sound May 2015 (Regular Edition) | Page 33

‘Harvest Home’, despite its organic
moniker, gets a radical overhaul from
Magnus that sees it transformed into the
arena of a smoky German transgender
club. Together with ‘Sad Lover’, it
represents the biggest departure from
the original track. On ‘Sad Lover’, Mikey
Young takes a fairly standard four-to-thefloor rhythm and turns it into new wave
synthpop, almost echoing Lanegan’s
recent audio curve.

MARK LANEGAN
BAND
A Thousand Miles Of Midnight
HEAVENLY RECORDINGS
Lending tunes from his ‘Phantom Radio’
album to some remixing pals reaps
rewards for the ever-inventive stalwart

Coming across as such a sweet and
tender confessional, ‘Torn Red Heart’
could have been written by Burt
Bacharach. It’s the man who looks like
an intellectual pebble – Moby – who’s
on knob twiddling duty here. While he
might be well practised in providing an
electronic backdrop to a gut-punching
vocal, not enough of the initial recording
remains to keep it in any way emotive.
The highlight, aside from UNKLE’s
exquisite lesson in how to layer sound
on ‘The Killing Season’, is when Lanegan

invites his old Gutter Twins compadre
Greg Dulli to orchestrate his gambit.
What the ‘I Am A Wolf’ reworking lacks
in the exposed desolation of the original,
it makes up for in its uneasy, trip hoppy
back and forth. Dulli lends his tortured
falsetto to the track, lest you forget that
these were voices born out of the lay-itbare grunge era.
Lanegan’s voice is exactly the kind of
weapon that all electronic artists wish
they had in their arsenal. Blisteringly
real, wretched and honest, it has a
fidelity that can’t be recreated with
synthesised instruments. It’s exactly this,
however, that has made them interesting
bedfellows on ‘A Thousand Miles Of
Midnight’. With this episode in artistic
play, Lanegan has given as much to those
remixing as to himself. May this era of
discovery continue.
EMMA R GARWOOD

After 31 years in the game, far from
being kaput, Mark Lanegan has spent
the last few years licking the musical
battery. The one-time Screaming Trees
frontman ushered in his own electronic
explorations on his 2012 album, ‘Blues
Train’, and the 2014 follow-up, ‘Phantom
Radio’. Now he’s exercised controlled
artistic abandon by opening up ‘Phantom
Radio’ to a platform of remixes. This
electro diversion is proving itself to be
no passing fancy or mid-life crisis; this
signals a full-blown, goddamned love
affair.
If the manifesto is to be believed,
Lanegan handpicked his collaborators
for ‘A Thousand Miles Of Midnight’, like
former bandmate Greg Dulli and recent
collaborators Soulsavers and Moby.
However, it’s some of the lesser known
artists that provide the more interesting
deviations. When Pye Corner Audio’s
take on ‘Floor Of The Ocean’ really kicks
in, the edgy beat persists like a heavy
pulse after a long night on the uppers.

Pic: Steve Gullick