Beggars Banquet Us
2004
Bubblegum
About This Album
With the Screaming Trees an increasingly distant memory and his brief tenure with Queens of the Stone Age seemingly over and done, Mark Lanegan appears to have well and truly become a solo artist, and while the dark and blues-shot introspections of Whiskey for the Holy Ghost and The Winding Sheet felt like a respite from Lanegan's usual musical diet of the time, Bubblegum sounds like an effort to fuse the nocturnal atmospherics of his solo work with the impressive brain/brawn ratio of his better-known bands. Credited to the Mark Lanegan Band (though there's no consistent set of musicians from track to track), Bubblegum is hardly short on the moody stuff, with Lanegan's nicotine-buffered pipes leading these songs though any number of empty streets and unhappy events, as on the jonesed-out road trip of "Strange Religion," the pained drift of "One Hundred Days," and the wasted longing of "Morning Glory Wine" -- notice a common theme yet? (Oh, and in case you were wondering, the album's title refers not to teen-centric pop music, but a line from his song "Bombed": "When I'm bombed, I stretch like bubblegum/And look too long straight at the morning sun.
Track List (try tracks 2,4,6,8 and 12)

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