Mark Lanegan & Duke Garwood - With Animals - [Vinyl]

It all starts with an incantation; something shamanic from a death mask Pied Piper. Over the stuttering click and kick of a primitive drum box and a wash of ebbing, flowing sound, a voice invites the listener to join his nocturnal chorus. "C'mon now midnight children, sing a dark harmony / lay it down midnight people, create your own alchemy." Like a crack of light glimpsed from behind a closed door in the black of night, it is a weird and compelling proposition, the first track (entitled Save Me) in the remarkable sequence of songs that forms With Animals. Recorded in LA, Pasadena and Joshua Tree, With Animals is the second album by Mark Lanegan and Duke Garwood, two artists who've spent their careers stalking the peripheries and mapping sounds of the small hours. The record's twelve songs are spectral and sinewy, often defined by the spaces in between the sounds. A ghost's whistle weaves itself around a pulsing single note on Lonesome Infidel; Feast to Famine's hard luck story floats above a guitar part so strung out and washed with distortion it's become barely recognisable. It's soul music for anyone who's long since left the crossroads. Over the last decade, Lanegan and Garwood have worked in tangent on 2013's Black Pudding as well as on Lanegan's solo records (Garwood contributed to 2012's Blues Funeral and 2017's Gargoyle after which he toured as part of Lanegan's band). Writing and recording was split between studio collaboration and sharing music between Garwood's home in London and Lanegan's in Los Angeles. Elsewhere, technology helped make the duo's transatlantic working relationships relatively easy. "Over the years, we've recorded together and apart. This time, I started this record alone, with many animals as company," says Garwood. "It flowed, I set to work and out it came. Our music is instinct, there is not much talking about it, just creating. I think that if you are at peace with your work, and feeling it right, it flows, and can feel 'easy'. Music isn't meant to be hard. Though sometimes it can burn you to ashes. Making music for a singer, so they can inhabit it with a song means hitting the right soul buttons. There is no hit without a miss. It is a healing record, for us the makers, and for the listeners. It grows natural. We are gardeners of sonic feelings."

Mark Lanegan & Duke Garwood - With Animals - [Vinyl]

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