Mark Lanegan – Bubblegum XX

 

 

Mark Lanegan – Bubblegum XX
Beggars Arkive – 2024 
Rock, Alternative
Rated: *****

It was a landmark album. Still is. And when the twentieth anniversary of Bubblegum rolled around in 2024, the box set that followed in August felt like a long-lost telegram from a former life. Every bit as arresting as the first time I heard it back in 2004, maybe even sharper, like a blade that’s grown hungrier with time. But listening to it that summer was hard. The world had shifted underfoot. As the date crept closer marking three years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that other ghost-date rose behind it… 

So let me start by saying: I’m sorry, Mr. Lanegan, for not putting these words down sooner, for letting years drift by before honoring this beautiful resurrection, the demos, the b-sides, the unreleased fragments that gathered themselves into Bubblegum XX. I had the privilege of speaking with Lanegan a couple of times, and with many of the conspirators who helped build this strange and majestic cathedral of an album. Those conversations remain small, burning lanterns in my memory....

I remember asking him, back in 2013, why “Josephine” never made it beyond the mythic, cigarette-stained Methamphetamine Blues Sessions that leaked around the original release. It was one of my favorite orphaned songs. His answer was brief but chivalrous: “Josh wrote it. It wasn’t one of mine.” And yet, there it stands now, rightfully reclaimed on the twentieth-anniversary edition. The sixth solo album, the one that somehow manages to be his most personal and his most successful, his rawest and most heavy since the Screaming Trees days. An album that bleeds openly, like a man holding out his wrists for the world to read...

Even the short, spectral duet “Bombed” recorded in a single take with Wendy Rae Fowler as their marriage was collapsing into dust, feels like a confession left smoldering on the floorboards. And “Wedding Dress” sounds, in hindsight, like a farewell note to anyone who ever hoped he might stay home, even for love, the traveler’s curse he carried deep in his bones...

But beyond the exposed nerves and scorched-heart honesty, there’s the constant presence of comrades, great musicians stepping out of the shadows like saints and outlaws offering their hands and wrists in a same way. We could name them all, of course, but we stick to the vocal parts: the purgatory-lit duets with PJ Harvey on “Hit The City” and “Come To Me,” songs that leave burn marks on the ears; Chris Goss, lifting “One Hundred Days” into a kind of storm-lit prayer; Alain Johannes, whose soft, sorrow-stitched backing on “Morning Glory Wine” feels like a hand resting gently on the shoulder. You can almost hear the electricity crackle through those sessions, streetlights popping, dry storms rolling over the horizon, lightning looking for a place to strike...

The box set gives us the remastered fifteen tracks, but it also opens the door to the motel rooms and dim corners where Lanegan recorded sketches with Troy Van Leeuwen, captures from nights thick with smoke and wandering thoughts. We get the full Methamphetamine Blues Sessions, the Here Comes That Weird Chill EP, and demos abandoned only because Lanegan heard some other ghost-part calling to him. Like the fully realized “Union Tombstone,” with Beck drifting in on vocals, harmonica, and guitar, turning it into a desert crossroad hymn that feels like a mirage finally made real...

An album like this doesn’t age. It ferments, darkens, deepens. Tonight, we spin it again, front to back, the way it deserves, thinking of Lanegan, of the roads he walked and the shadows he made beautiful. He left us so much, the words, the music, the voice that sounded like it had already lived nine lifetimes. These are the kind of gifts that never fade. They just cut deeper...

(Written by JK)

Bandcamp

Instagram

 Facebook