The Indescribable Voice of Mark Lanegan

This is a repost of an entry from last summer. When I wrote it I felt that Mark Lanegan was working in the shadows too much for someone so good, and not getting his due. But lately it seems like he's everywhere and his project with Gred Dulli, The Gutter Twins, is getting a lot of love. So here's a rerun, with an added mp3 from the Gutter Twins album Saturnalia.



Mark Lanegan’s voice cannot be described. In fact, until recently, Mark Lanegan’s voice couldn’t even be recorded. At least not properly. It took more than 30 engineers over the course of 20 plus records in as many years just to crack the code of his baritone – a rumbling throttle so coarse you could strike a match on it. This long-overdue feat was accomplished on his 2005 album Bubblegum, on which his voice has so much low end it practically gives the bass guitar the bitch seat. 20 years is a long time for a musician to go without having their instrument accurately captured, especially a world-famous singer like Lanegan who’s fronted bands as big as The Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age. But you can’t really fault the recording engineers. After all, Lanegan’s voice is a bit of a physical anomaly and was once even the subject of scientific research:

In the mid ’90s he volunteered for a series of experiments in Phoenix that were involved with the weaponization of sound. The so-called “brown frequency” produces extremely intense resonance at very low frequencies, causing a person in its path to spontaneously shit their pants. But scientists believed that lower-midrange frequencies, like the ones in Lanegan’s baritone, had the potential to do even more damage to the human body, including shattering bones and bursting blood vessels, if wielded with enough severity. So Lanegan spent a bizarre week being the government’s guinea pig, a pretty strange move for a rebel’s rebel who’s been at odds with the law his whole life. But Lanegan is not the kind of person you want to try and understand. Like God, you’re just supposed to listen to him, not fathom him.

Click here to read the rest and for mp3s.