Album Review: Mark Lanegan Band — consequenceofsound.net

Mark Lanegan has traveled a long way from the germinal folk rock and acoustic blues days of his solo career, an outset that has made his recent detour toward more synth- and beat-driven fare both curious and intriguing. Phantom Radio‘s five-song teaser, No Bells on Sunday, confirmed where Lanegan’s true north currently runs, as he continued to tinker with and master the electronic arrangements that revitalized his patented dead-slow rock on 2012’s Blues Funeral. As on that album, No Bells revealed that Lanegan’s primary challenge remains negotiating the balance between instrumental stretches and vocals — not always discerning between when his silence creates tension and when it causes a song to bloat or lull. Those instincts have been largely refined on Phantom Radio, making for a finely tuned 38-minute album that wastes no time in delivering us down Lanegan’s dark stretch of highway. At the same time, though, the record can’t help but make one feel that the singer’s ongoing journey down this path, even the wrong turns, has been more compelling than this particular destination.

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