Straight Songs of Sorrow can be a lot to take in in one sitting, but, hell, what else do we have going on in these strange, strange days?

Mark Lanegan is the monster under your bed.

Call it Lanegan-noir, a subgenre that shifts between crunching driving anthems and stark anti-hymns.

[xrr rating=3.5/5]Mark Lanegan has one of those voices that is distinct from the first note. It’s not quite Tom Waits’ blackened croak, but it has the gritty edge of an old worn-out boot trying singing Johnny Cash covers. Lanegan’s voice has a power all its own that’s been obvious from the heyday of Screaming Trees, and Josh Homme put Lanegan’s …

[xrr rating=3.25/5]What’s the most loathsome aspect of best-of compilations? If it’s not the manner in which they strip away context endemic to the songs’ placement on their home albums, it’s surely the way fans’ loyalties are exploited by compelling them shell out a disproportionate amount of cash for a new track or two. Always an artist to flout conventions, Mark …

[xrr rating=3.5/5]As its name suggests, Blues Funeral is a grave album, loaded with references to death, dying and various other manners of finality. Although Mark Lanegan remains, however unfairly, regarded more for the excellent set of albums he recorded with Isobel Campbell than for either his Screaming Trees or later band efforts, Blues Funeral is a solid entry in his …

Screaming Trees Last Words: The Final Recordings Rating: 3.3/5.0 Label: Sunyata Though I was only a suburban rock ‘n’ roll snob on the cusp of fully engorged adult snobbery when the Screaming Trees announced their inevitable break-up in 2000, I can’t say I remembered a whole lot of tears shed for the foursome. Always the bridesmaids and never the brides …

Revisit: Mark Lanegan Whiskey for the Holy Ghost 1994 Revisit is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that now deserve a second look. In “Montezuma,” from this year’s Helplessness Blues, Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold sings of one of his generation’s common anxieties, that of adulthood having escaped him or having been delayed indefinitely. In many ways, still dependent upon …

Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan Hawk Rating: 2.5/5.0 Label: Vanguard And to think, there was a time when Mark Lanegan’s fans fretted for the man’s reclusive nature. Following the dissolution of Screaming Trees in the mid-’90s, the golden tones of Lanegan’s nicotine-seasoned pipes – like catnip to his listeners – were in short supply; there was 1998’s Scraps at Midnight, …

Queens of the Stone Age Rated R: 10th Anniversary Deluxe Edition Rating: 4.5/5.0 Label: Interscope Modern rock, that pat radio format/genre grouping that, today, is known to include anyone from the pigeon-weary Kings of Leon to the Hair extras that form MGMT, was, in 2000, a fruitful orchard for the kind of expertly, soullessly lathed pop hits that filled many …