When Mark Lanegan reached grunge-pummeled ears as frontman of Screaming Trees in the 1990s, he deserved and surpassed comparisons to Jim Morrison. Deserved, because he had similar fine-grain rock ’n’ roll sensuality; surpassed, because he never gusted toward the bloated bombast of Morrison’s later delivery.
Or, as his subsequent Queens of the Stone Age bandmate Josh Homme put it, when Lanegan sings about toothpaste, “I wanna brush.”
With Somebody’s Knocking, Lanegan’s 11th solo-ish long-player, the man turns his flinty stare and dustily jeweled voice toward unexpectedly brighter, more plastically colorful corners of his musical psyche. Yes, the first of the 14 songs is “Disbelief Suspension,” which reestablishes Lanegan’s tendency to be seduced by, and to seduce with, darkness, and the hard-driving rhythm and reverberating guitar are among his trademarks.
Even that opener, though, edges into a neon dawn, and the very next track, “Letter Never Sent,” envisions that dawn as a cross between classic cyberpunk and almost equally classic New (Order) Wave. The two-way seduction remains.
It also remains through the rest of Somebody’s Knocking, giving Lanegan exploratory latitude as he soars through “Stitch It Up” as if channeling both the Walker Brothers’ “Nite Flights” and Fatima Mansions’ razor-gleam remake, strides across the Depeche Mode drama of “Gazing From the Shore,” and lets his foot freely tap as the oldest living man at the haunted disco of “Penthouse High.”
Longtime Lanegan devotees will approvingly note that the various explorations and changes of sonic scenery haven’t clogged his throat or muddied the boots of his band, as it were: for all the moral murk, mind-altering substances and dim lighting of the songs, the production is basically clean.
Lanegan’s hands aren’t clean; nor is his voice. Yet Somebody’s Knocking has something pure in spirit. You’ll wanna brush.
