‘Straight Songs Of Sorrow’ combines musical trace elements fromearly Mark Lanegan albums with the synthesized constructs of laterwork. The meditative acoustic guitar fingerpicking – provided byLamb Of God’s Mark Morton – on ‘Apples From A Tree’ and ‘HangingOn (For DRC)’ echo 1994’s ‘Whiskey For The Holy Ghost’. Yet one ofthat record’s touchstones was Van Morrison’s ‘Astral Weeks’, echoedin the new album’s opener ‘I Wouldn’t Want To Say’, where Laneganextemporises à la Ballerina over musique concrète wave patternsgenerated by his latest favourite compositional tool, a miniaturecomputer-synth called the Organelle. The lyric clings onto the music,emulating queasy momentum: “Swinging from death… to revival.”“That song is the explanation, the beginning and middle and end ofthat entire period of time,” Mark says. “The encapsulation of theentire experience, book and record. So I started with that.”Lanegan affirms that every song references a specific episode orperson in his autobiography, albeit some more explicitly than others.‘Hanging On (For DRC)’ is a loving ode to his friend Dylan Carlson,genius progenitor of drone metal and a fellow unlikely survivor ofSeattle’s narcotic dramas. “I was always unhappy, and he was the guywho was always smiling, even through my crazy schemes thateventually got both of us into a lot of trouble.”‘Straight Songs Of Sorrow’ feels both definitive and unique, aculmination of its creator’s arc yet also indicative of the energy thatdrives him onto future horizons.

• 1. I Wouldn't Want To Say
• 2. Apples From a Tree
• 3. This Game of Love
• 4. Ketamine
• 5. Bleed All Over
• 6. Churchbells, Ghosts
• 7. Internal Hourglass Discussion
• 8. Stockholm City Blues
• 9. Skeleton Key
• 10. Daylight In the Nocturnal House
• 11. Ballad of the Dying Rover
• 12. Hanging On (For Drc)
• 13. At Zero Below
• 14. Eden Lost and Found