![]() After that, he just tossed these instrumental tracks at me: ’Go sing these’. The first thing we worked on together was a video of mine, and that was killer. You just know it with some people, that it’s going to be cool. “But then we reunited, (him) opening for me again as a solo act. “We never talked about doing anything for several years,” Lanegan comments. It becomes a part of who you are right now.” When something enters your life like that it rarely leaves. It was the soundtrack for a certain period in my life. That record became part of the fabric of my canon and it never left. So that record cemented my opinion of him as a singer and songwriter. But Bubblegum was tied to a moment of my life that meant something to me beyond knowing Mark as a person. That was the first one I knew things he had worked on and thought were cool. “I really became a fan of Mark’s work through Bubblegum. ![]() I loved their records.” Cardamone also expresses fond memories of that tour, and specifically, that album. “The Icarus Line had the same booking agency as me, and they presented them as the opening act,” Lanegan remembers. The duo connected for the first time in 2004 when Cardamone’s now-defunct post-hardcore agitators The Icarus Line opened for Lanegan’s solo band after the release of the latter’s album Bubblebum. Especially the nature of that book, it was unbelievably painful at times to go back into those memories. ![]() ![]() But writing a book like that: zero pleasure. It’s something I do instinctually and I don’t put a lot of thought into it. “Writing a book like that is a completely different experience than writing poetry or songs,” he says over his phone from his bucolic Ireland residence. That, in a nutshell, wasn’t exactly his idea of ‘fun’ either. Lanegan himself had to revisit myriad blood-curdling, bone-rattling situations he left on the back burner for many years. To find some kind of order in that chaos.” Most of my work is that: super personal and trying to find meaning in stuff that seems meaningless on the surface. Rather than walk away from it I decided to bathe in it for months on end and mine my own sort of grief or meaning. “It was about trying to find meaning, some sort of sense out of a situation that in my own mind seemed like chaos and confusion. “The Quarentina project was more or less exposure therapy,” Cardamone comments from his garden, surrounded by soothing birdsong and insect buzzing. Lanegan spent the bulk of 2020 navigating the whirlwind fallout of his brutal tell-all memoirs Sing Backwards And Weep, whereas Cardamone’s plans took a left turn by the necessity of making Quarentina, an audiovisual album project that compelled him to bare his soul and rummage the debris of his existence during the pandemic. And given the nature of their respective previous projects, that sense of fun is wholly relished and cultivated. Like building a neon-lit retro-futuristic metropolis around Devils Tower, Cardamone’s spacey synth arrangements accommodate Lanegan’s signature ashen drawl with palpable reverence.įirst and foremost, Dark Mark vs Skeleton Joe sounds like two rock paragons having a giddy good time just creating, and – in their own words from separately conducted interviews – “just letting it flow”. Sonically, their synthpop-based debut album often calls to mind a campy, House of Horror aesthetic that underpins the real-life terrors smoldering upwards from the bonfire. Under their twisted outlaw alter egos Dark Mark and Skeleton Joe, Mark Lanegan and Joe Cardamone survey this notion with an infectious spirit of inquiry. The horrors of reality tend to eclipse whatever fictional horrors a person can dream up. ![]()
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