SCREAMING TREES - Uncle Anesthesia (1991)

As dismissive as Lanegan may be about it, Uncle Anesthesia was an important record for his career, being his band's major label debut, and something that clearly received its share of money and time.  Important enough that I did think it merited a complete dissection, rather than the quicker* runthrough that the indie releases did.  This is our man's legacy, here, whether he likes it or not.

 

 

Track One:  "Beyond This Horizon"

Right away, we have raucous rock and roll that's smoother than we're used to from this band without compromising what makes them what they are.  Here are the Conners playing off each other the way they used to.  Here's Pix in full rock-drummer mode, driving the song forward.  And here's Lanegan singing lyrics that - deny it all he wants - sound like he could have written, and harmonizing with himself the way he did on his own record.  He's owning the melody, and kicks it up nicely for the chorus.  

 

I've pondered a few times why this song sounds so quintessentially, well, "grunge."  It's '90s hard rock in a way that the Trees' '80s material isn't.  I don't know if I can name any particular things that BTH does that rock bands haven't been doing since the '60s, just that it feels somehow different.  I think the answer is threefold.  The level of fuzz and distortion give the music a real dark edge; distorted guitars also obviously existed for a long time, but this particular era of rock just put that element so front and center.  Two, the production can make the song sound louder than older quirky hard rock just by virtue of technology that didn't exist during the heyday of the Kinks et al.  And then there's the singer!  Lanegan doesn't sound like anyone else.  By this time, he's learned how to make a song his own.

 

Track Two:  "Bed Of Roses" 

Back to a more typical Trees mid-tempo.  On an objective standard I like Lanegan's vocal approach here too.  I just don't find the song very interesting.  I know I overuse the word "inert," but would it be too much to ask a melody to go somewhere?  The Trees are often so interested in just setting a vibe, whereas they've just showed us that they have a "Beyond This Horizon" in them!  Whether it's that, or "Grey Diamond Desert," just do something with like, a tune or something. 

 

Track Three:  "Uncle Anesthesia"

This one gets a lot of goodwill from its quirky screeching riff.  I'm having a hard time figuring out exactly how to process it.  It's another inert melody but then it kicks into a talky chorus of the sort I like.  I wish the song rocked harder, but the chorus does provide some needed soft-loud dynamics and Pix is throwing in fills like they're a hard-rock band while Lanegan just seemingly goes off script and riffs on the melody in the background during the bridge.  The lyrics come a little closer than usual to meaning something, but then, "sweet-ass summertime."  A study in contradictions, much like the Trees themselves.  Much like the Trees themselves, I don't love it, but think there's more good than bad in this song overall.

 

Track Four:  "Story Of Her Fate"

Just 1:40 long, which is good, because I don't really get it.  Fuzz alone doesn't make a song.  What's up with that "yup?"  The coughing at the end makes it sound like this one is something of a piss-take, but if so, why is it track #4, and where's the part that's funny?

 

Track Five: "Caught Between"

All right, here we go.  Lee's big cavernous intro makes it clear that he means business, and it resolves into a riff that's objectively a pretty standard rock riff, yet I'm hearing it as vaguely Celtic somehow.  Lanegan on vocals gets a refrain to really sink his teeth into - "but the shadows still remain" - and he makes everything he can out of it.  The repeating the first verse, slightly recontextualized and shouted, followed by the outro breaking down into incoherence, reminds me of the way songs from The Winding Sheet are constructed.  Am I really meant to believe that Lanegan hated this song too and wanted nothing to do with this kind of music?  He sings it like something he wrote, and I can't imagine he didn't, at minimum, shape his part into what he wanted to be doing.

 

Track Six:  "Lay Your Head Down"

Now, it seems like every Trees record manages exactly one successfully pretty pop song full of those classic minor harmonies.  Well, here's this album's equivalent of "Seeing And Believing."  Listening to songs like this I've sometimes wondered whether any singer could be plugged in, or whether they needed a Mark Lanegan.  I'm starting to settle on the latter.  His gravely tone makes the harmonies of the chorus sound like something more than a standard psychedelic rock song, while the respite that comes with the hook feels earned.  This one I believe is totally Lee's song, but Mark is an indispensable part of the alchemy of making the whole thing work.

 

Track Seven:  "Before We Arise"

Another short one that starts out like it's doing something interesting with the wordless ooohing in the background before a coiled dirge that wisely stays in the acid-blues groove and then ends, rather than trying to transform into anything else.

 

Track Eight:  "Something About Today"

There's some potential here that I don't think the track quite figures out how to unlock.  Lanegan seems subdued, except when he's yelling during what seems to be the "wrong" parts.  The psychedelic solo seems to come from a different song, but once the guitar and bass start matching its downbeats in kind of a pop-punk way, it starts to click... until it doesn't.  There are the bones of a potential classic here; maybe another two rewrites or so could have gotten it there? 

 

Track Nine:  "Alice Said"

I hate the lyrics, and I guess the fact that I'm paying so much attention to them means that the rest of the song is a bunch of generic-sounding stuff that we've all heard from this band a hundred times.  I write a bit more below about Lanegan's overall assessment that Uncle Anesthesia is the same shit but better sounding; in short, I get that perspective but don't really agree with it.   However, when I listen to something like "Alice Said," I absolutely feel why he might have sometimes decided that he hated every minute of this.  Here's a song that could just as easily have been on the first EP, and it would've kinda sucked there too (with the outro guitar part still being cool enough to make one second-guess any submissiveness of the band whole Screaming Trees thing).

 

Track Ten:  "Time For Light"

On the other hand, "Time For Light" shows the band knowing their strengths and leaning into them.  Sometimes they excel at going heavy off a light jangly guitar riff, or twisting an uplifting melody into something nastier.  I'm doing my best to resist lumping them in as another punk-inspired member of the Seattle Sound because they're clearly something else, but these bands pretty much had to have been influencing each other.  I don't know if we get the bass and drum forward loud/soft dynamics in a world without Lanegan and Kurt Cobain's mutual admiration society.  (The twiddly guitar background is also an obvious predecessor to the hits from Sweet Oblivion, but obviously we're not there yet.)  Whatever "grunge" is, our definition needs to make room for stuff like "Time For Light."

 

Track Eleven:  "Disappearing"

I always enjoy "Disappearing" as a chill vibe-out track; horns are actually used well, and the solo fits the mood.  I don't remember much about the song after it's done, but that's fine.

 

Track Twelve:  "Ocean Of Confusion"

I don't remember much about this song even while it's playing, which isn't so good.  Another rocker to break up the slower numbers around it.  The chorus is fine, I suppose.  Lanegan's vocals are buried in guitar fuzz on a way that they're not for much of the rest of the record.

 

Track Thirteen:  "Closer" 

"Closer" is the only track besides, barely, "Caught Between" to top five minutes.  The moody verse that, I gotta say, sounds a lot like something that could've been on The Winding Sheet, except that then it's got a mantra-like chorus:

Bring us closer to the fire

Bring us closer to the flame

The end and beginning are the same

(It's all the same) 

 

Lanegan is of course very much at home here singing lyrics like this.  After the natural conclusion of a normal song, the Conners and Pix just keep riffing, and Lanegan belies the statement that the world can't bring "us" higher by repeating a few of the phrases over and over around the music.  One more psychedelic breakdown, like during the indie days.  

 

 

 

Overall thoughts:

I try to tell the narrative of my reaction to the record through the track-by-track.  With a band like Screaming Trees, that's not always possible; how I feel about, say, "Ocean Of Confusion" is less important than than how the record as a whole feels as a vibe piece.  So, as someone who enjoyed the indie records for what they were overall but didn't connect deeply with them, does Uncle Anesthesia move the needle?

 

Since this series is about Lanegan, I keep going back to his assessment that Lee is just writing the same songs as ever, except produced better and on a major label.  Well, yes and no.  Sure, it's akin to what the Trees have been doing since the beginning.  I think the increased clarity of this professional production benefits them.  Rather than sanding down the band's edge in the slightest, being able to hear the different parts clearly helps ensure than Lanegan doesn't have to scream to be heard over the band, because he can growl and moan and get mixed to the front.  This takes advantage of the Trees' most unique trait in his singing.  Despite his claims to hate the music, he definitely put a lot of love, sweat, and tears into the vocal parts, and the time shows.  

 

Now, if one doesn't like this vaguely '60s-inspired form of heavy distorted indie-rock, I doubt Uncle Anesthesia would change one's mind much about it.  It's not really my cup of tea, which is fine; we all have our peccadilloes.  If I didn't already know what was coming a few years later, I might well have concluded that this band had basically by this point showed me all that it'd ever be capable of doing.  What I will say is that while the record doesn't feel as exciting to me as something like Invisible Lantern - still their high-water mark (so far) to my ears - it's a return to form compositionally from the disappointing Buzz Factory.  I speculated early on in this project whether the Conners would gradually recognize what they had in their vocalist; it's clear that they do.  From both a vocal and a songwriting standpoint, the band has an idea of what it is that they do best, and what sort of words the big guy with the mic will be able to sing with authority.  We can hear the results.   I was actually a little surprised to read a comment from Lee Conner (part of some idle reading about the later-years relationship, or lack thereof, between the two men) in which Lee indicated that he's not a big fan of the vocals here - not so much criticizing Lanegan's performance, more that he perceives the production and distortion as putting up barriers to the singer sounding his best.  I totally disagree with that.  This is about as good as Lanegan has sounded to date while fronting the Trees.

 

It'll be interesting to see if I notice what Barret Martin brings to Screaming Trees once we move on to the last couple of releases.  It's a chicken-egg thing, since I can't really imagine anyone playing these particular songs better than Mark Pickerel does, but maybe the songs would have been different to start with if written for and in part by) a different drummer? 

 

Favorite track:  "Beyond This Horizon"

Runner up:  "Lay Your Head Down"

Least favorite track:  "Alice Said"

Rating:  3/5

On to more of Sing Backwards And Weep, whenever I get around to it!

*Yes, I know I carry on.  "Quicker" is a relative term.