Soulsavers f/ Mark Lanegan: "Revival"

Mark Lanegan is becoming monolithic: sitting broadly astride several scenes at once he's homeless, capable of adding gravity wherever he appears with a bible-black voice and consumptive's romantic presence. On the Soulsavers' recent record, It's Not How Far You Fall, It's The Way You Land, he's managed to transform what might have been a bland coffee table noir into a great slab of brooding prophecy, dragging the band along behind him with all his other tattered ghosts. Taken together, those ghosts are fast becoming an impressive body of work.

"Revival," with its church organ and gospel undertow, sees Lanegan pleading like some soiled and fallen preacher (it's almost impossible when flapping about for similies to capture Lanegan with not to seize on the biblical -- this must mean something); the key to the track is that Lanegan, like later Johnny Cash, lets you believe in his anguish. When he sings, "why am I so blind with my eyes wide open?" this isn't dressed up distress but a blurring between his life and his work. And because that deep throbbing gospel choir fits so neatly, and because Lanegan sounds so comfortable intoning above it, that tired cliché sounds like a whole new philosophy, and it's absolutely insensible that no one thought of it before. And that's because Lanegan is staring death straight in the face.