June 20 - June 27, 1 9 9 6

Elemental rock

Screaming Trees squeeze power out of Dust

by Matt Ashare

In his biography of Nirvana, Come As You Are, Michael Azzerad borrows a word from Irish culture to describe the emotional impact of Kurt Cobain's voice. The word is "yarrrrragh," and it signifies that "rare quality that some voices have, an edge, an ability to say something about the human condition that goes far beyond merely singing the right lyrics and hitting the right notes." Although his primary aim is to explain the musical dynamic that contributed to Nirvana's success, Azzerad places Cobain in the company of another contemporary Seattle singer who possesses such a gift. It's not Eddie Vedder, Chris Cornell, or Layne Staley -- it's the tall, long-haired, gravel-voiced guy from the small, backwoods town of Ellensburg, Washington: Mark Lanegan. And he fronts one of the pleasant surprises on this summer's Lollapalooza mainstage line-up: Screaming Trees.

Lanegan's frayed, nicotine-stained vocal cords have never sounded better or conveyed more than they do on Dust (Epic), the eighth and strongest Screaming Trees full-length. Set against a timeless tapestry woven from the same sturdy threads of '60s psychedelia, '70s hard rock, '80s punk, and grunge that have been the Trees' raw materials for more a decade, Lanegan's brooding baritone resonates with an earthy beauty, otherworldly sadness, and gentle yet forceful longing for a kind of indefinable spiritual redemption. It's riff-rock with a cavernous emotional depth, a surface of gnarled hooks fashioned from churning, melodic guitars, and, in between, plush, exotic layers of organ, Mellotron, acoustic guitar, sitar, and percussion.

But Dust also represents a hard-won creative victory for the entire band, who by the admission of the group's founding triumvirate (Lanegan and brothers Van and Gary Lee Conner) haven't always lived up to their potential. Inspired by the breakthrough success of 1992's Sweet Oblivion, a disc that yielded two solid radio hits ("I Nearly Lost You" and "Dollar Bill") and landed the Trees on a Spin-sponsored summer tour with Soul Asylum and the Spin Doctors, the band headed straight from the road to studio to record a quick follow-up. But despite the presence of Sweet Oblivion producer Don Flemming, the Trees ended up with what a bemused Gary Lee Conner -- the band's hefty, bearded guitarist and one of its main songwriters -- refers to as "the aborted album."

As his brother Van explained to me in a suburban Seattle studio a few weeks ago, "We got started too soon after touring. We were just excited that Sweet Oblivion had done as well as it had. But the damage -- the mental and physical damage of touring -- was just too much."

Gary Lee Conner (who's known by friends simply as Lee) concurs, "We really felt that we had to follow up Sweet Oblivion right away to capitalize on the success we were having. But I think we lost sight of what this is really all about: writing songs. We just sat down and told ourselves that we had to write a new record now, but we weren't writing together, which was part of the problem. Sweet Oblivion had been the first time we'd really worked together on the songs and on the arrangements, the way a writer would do with a story, editing and fine-tuning. We really skipped that step on the aborted album, even though at the time I probably thought we'd done all we needed to do."

Instead of trying to salvage what everyone, including the newest Tree, drummer Barrett Martin, agreed was a less than inspiring effort, the band made the difficult decision to scrap the sessions and move on. When they finally regrouped to record in late October of last year, they'd found a new producer, George Drakoulias (Black Crowes, Jayhawks), and reconnected with the rustic muse that had fueled the creative breakthroughs of Sweet Oblivion.

The first tune on Dust, "Halo of Ashes," picks up where the opening track of Sweet Oblivion left off with its ominous lyrics, rumbling tom-toms, and Eastern-tinged guitar drones. But this time Martin plays a resonant harmonium line over Lee's churning distortion, which fuses the overdrive of his Gibson with the exotic ring of a Danelectro Coral Electric Sitar. Lanegan's gruff, soulful delivery of impressionist lyrics like "She wears a halo of ashes/Expect her on the wind/Waits on me so patiently I no longer can pretend" pushes toward an otherworldly plane of swirling guitars while a forceful, galloping beat and driving bass line keep the song anchored. The effect is at once meditative and explosive.

The Trees were once punk enough to be part of the SST roster. Of course, that was at a time when Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth were also part of the Southern California punk label's extended family. Trees discs from that era -- Invisible Lantern and Buzz Factory (both SST) -- may have shared a fondness for acid-fueled psychedelia with yet another SST act, Hüsker Dü, but they rarely indulged in the pummeling tempos of hardcore punk. These days the Trees are more apt to quote from a classic-rock chestnut like the Small Faces' "Song of a Baker" (which they covered on the B-side of a 1992 single after openly borrowing riffs from the song for years) than from anything in the punk canon. But the band -- through either skill or intuition or a combination of both -- have steered clear of both the hipster irony in Urge Overkill-style retro-rock and the limiting formalism of revivalists like the Black Crowes or Jayhawks.

"It's not like we're trying to be a certain type of rock band," offers Martin from behind his kit in that same suburban studio. "It's sort of like taking the best of the classic stuff and mixing it all together with each of our own individual tastes in music. I don't really know how to explain it, but I keep thinking of this compliment we got from somebody at our record company. The person said, `I really love your new record and I don't know what you are, but you're not really an alternative band.' I think the one thing that ties us all together is that this band is about songwriting. It comes down to writing good songs that would stand up with just an acoustic guitar and voice or with a full rock band."

Much of Dust is built on or around the coupling of acoustic guitar and voice. The rousing and anthemic "Dying Days" opens with a verse of comfortable, almost folky acoustic strumming before Martin kicks in with a muscular Bonham-style thrusting fill and the Conner brothers lay into a heavy, descending riff. Pearl Jam's Mike McCready guests on the track, unleashing a blustering, bluesy lead. Elsewhere, a melancholy cello winds its way through the acoustic-guitar intro to "Sworn and Broken" and then settles into the backdrop as electric guitars and organ build to a moving, mid-tempo climax. And Martin comes out from behind the drums on "Traveler," a largely unplugged tune that features multiple Mellotron-created strings and flute lines courtesy of Tom Petty's keyboard man, Benmont Tench (he's on eight of the disc's 10 tracks).

Thanks to Andy Wallace's dense yet uncluttered mix, Dust is the kind of disc that deserves the headphones, where you can appreciate the band's attention to details like watery tremolo on the cascading arpeggios that underscore the haunted sentiments of "Look at You," or the ghostly background vocals that bring a surreal edge to the pulsing reverie of "Make My Mind." Still, the Trees are very much a rock band's rock band, inspired by the timeless roar of the power chord on top of a hard-driving backbeat. Even "Gospel Plow," the disc's final track and a song that begins as a cross between an Arabic chant and a Southern spiritual, morphs into a hard Zeppelin-esque rocker.

"Gospel Plow" was one of only three tracks from the new album that the Trees played live at Avalon on June 11, their first gig in the US since the Spin tour ended a little less than three years ago. The band also tore through a gnarlier version of the sitar-laced "Halo of Ashes" and a churning "All I Know," with long-haired Lee Conner bashing the hell out of his SG and a black-clad Lanegan holding onto the microphone stand as if it were the only thing keeping the wall of melody from blowing him over. But most of the set was taken up by tracks from Sweet Oblivion because the Trees had been expecting to have a second guitarist on board for the tour. Josh Homme, formerly of Kyuss, is that second guitarist. He had been rehearsing the new material with the band and finally did join up with them last week in North Carolina after the Boston date.

"The live thing has always been really different for us than the studio thing," explains Lee. "We're used to just getting up there and thrashing through the songs. But now that we're gearing up to play really big stages and, for lack of a better word for it, arenas, we're realizing that we need another guitar player up there with us. Having had the experience before on that Spin Doctors/Soul Asylum tour, well, that was kind of a rude awakening for us because we'd never had to worry about filling up that much space with sound. So we're even thinking of adding a keyboard player for Lollapalooza."

The Trees have never had trouble kicking up a big mess of sound -- with or without keyboards or another guitar player. The struggle for them has been to mold the elemental roar of the Conners' guitars and the growl of Lanegan's vocals into something as focused as Sweet Oblivion. If it were easy, then there wouldn't have been any "aborted album," Dust would be just a really good rock disc, and we wouldn't need a word like "yarrrrragh."