Album Review: Mark Lanegan & Duke Garwood - With Animals

Mark Lanegan and Duke Garwood have circled each other for over a decade, with Garwood's guitar strung across both Gargoyle and Blues Funeral, yet, this is only their second double billed album.

Following on from the five-year-old, Black Pudding, the pair have created something a little lighter on the palate, let's say white souffle by way of the bayou, but that doesn't betray its density.

For fans of their equally extended careers, there'll be some retread, though it's less like local streets and more akin to visiting cemetery kin. The new ground covered is fresh and dirty as turned earth.

Inherently touching and darkly familiar, With Animals dulcet batch of misery is a slow-motion gut punch — the sort of thing that might slip out of a whiskey bottle onto a dusty old porch, staining a permanent lineament. There is so much gravel washed sadness, that you'd be forgiven for missing the slight social commentaries embedded in Lanegan's lyrics. The title track's cutting chorus, "Girl, you are a murderer," serves as an ode to meat consumption and also a wonderfully anti-romantic diatribe — combined with Garwood's cutting compositions, their songs have a tendency to stick in your soul.