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Mark Lanegan's new album, Straight Songs Of Sorrow, features guest appearances from Greg Dulli, Warren Ellis, John Paul Jones, Ed Harcourt and more .... 

‘Straight Songs Of Sorrow’ combines musical trace elements from early Mark Lanegan albums with the synthesized constructs of later work. The meditative acoustic guitar fingerpicking – provided by Lamb Of God’s Mark Morton – on ‘Apples From A Tree’ and ‘Hanging On (For DRC)’ echo 1994’s ‘Whiskey For The Holy Ghost’. Yet one of that record’s touchstones was Van Morrison’s ‘Astral Weeks’, echoed in the new album’s opener ‘I Wouldn’t Want To Say’, where Lanegan extemporises à la Ballerina over musique concrète wave patterns generated by his latest favourite compositional tool, a miniature computer-synth called the Organelle. The lyric clings onto the music, emulating queasy momentum: “Swinging from death... to revival.”

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