Mark Lanegan Band - Somebody's Knocking (2019)

Near the end of the last song on Mark Lanegan's outstanding 11th solo album - Somebody's Knocking - there's a line that sticks in the listener's mind long after the record stops spinning. "I felt its sound/down to my darkest, deepest root". Coming towards the close of the track Two Bells Ringing At Once - a gorgeous hymnal constructed from hazy ambient tones and swelling strings - those words might just sum up the driven artist's unshakable compulsion to create as well as the music lover's perpetual necessity to keep on seeking new sounds. And Mark Lanegan is very much both of those things. From the opening bars of Disbelief Suspension onwards, it's clear that Somebody's Knocking is an album made by someone deeply obsessed with how music - with all its primal, spiritual healing power - truly penetrates the soul. As a result, there's joy in the music, as if created from a perfect set of inspirations smashed and grabbed from God's own record shop. Some of the influences are oblique, others direct and fully respectful. From the Raw Power-esque garage metal grind of that opener to Letter Never Sent's rocket-powered take on Love-era kaleidoscope-psych, through the pensive subterranean murk of Dark Disco Jag and on to Playing Nero's sun-bleached riff on Joy Division's Atmosphere, there's the glee of infatuation running deep in the tracks. And, in some ways, that display of infatuation serves to change the very perception of Lanegan the artist - this album being less the tale of a brooding, crepuscular rock'n'roll veteran and more that of someone consumed by a lifelong love of words and sound fused together.