Mark Lanegan, the solo artist, has written music with his feet planted firmly in aged American soil. Over the course of four solo albums since 1990, his gritty blues, country and folk has become progressively more roots-oriented, not to mention more sophisticated. Lanegan's determination to hone his sound culminated with 1998's I'll Take Care of You, a covers album that ranged from Buck Owens- to Jeffrey Lee Pierce-penned songs, yet managed to unify all of them.Field Songs is, fortunately for us, more of the same, except that Lanegan's back to writing original material. This is sub-pop in the truest sense: it's music made in the pop/rock era with influences from before the era was even conceived. But his sonic palette has also widened. Just seconds into the opener, "One Way Track," after the snare-heavy percussion and soft electric and acoustic guitars shuffle in, the ears are pricked by low-decibel dissonance: echoing guitar scratches like high-pitched thunder or machine-gun fire; a twinkling piano like rain on a corrugated tin roof; buzzing like a recalcitrant computer. But none of it invades the space needed for his husky voice and lines like, "The stars and the moon aren't where they're supposed to be/ But a strange electric light falls so close to me."The next track, "No Easy Action," opens with female ahhh's before breaking into a whir- and acoustic-fueled tear through blues romps, gospel choirs, and rock psychedelics. As always, Lanegan's voice is as compellingly loud and high-pitched as it is low and smoky; but accompanied, as he is during this moment, by the almost tribal voices of the women, his music reaches an uplifting epiphany. And then there's the utterly different epiphany reached on "Field Song," where soft, reverberated chords give way to nearly a minute of crashing guitars. But on most of these tracks, the touches are very subtle: rain in the background of the beautiful, understated instrumental, "Blues for D"; distant guitars crackling like falling timbers on "Fix"; buzzing tolls ringing over the hills on "She's Done Too Much."While these additions have prevented Lanegan from being straight-jacketed by his roots influences, as some fans and critics feared, those addicted to Lanegan's dark sound need not worry. When you distill Field Songs, what's left is the same haunted man singing folk, blues, and country numbers for the depressed and downtrodden. Even with deep, yet restrained atmospherics at work-- as on "One Way Street"-- he's singing lines like, "I drink so much sour whiskey, I can hardly see." Furthermore, the majority of these tracks are still the full-sounding, yet bare-boned affairs that Lanegan has made his trademark. If any album is capable of delivering roots music's last gasp of popularity, Field Songs is it.
