Saturnalia has a mystical, unpredictable and ultimately masterful approach that allows it to materialise and at the same time withstands any expectations implied through its obscurity. It lends an undertone of confessional, ambitious themes, The Gutter Twins’ debut rises to new, surprising height. The artists themselves believe the album is spiritual but it’s also the flesh. In this it suffers and rejoices and it sins and is spiritually surreal.

The Gutter Twins’ work is distinctively ominous it searches a mood that lies in the band’s inner compilation. Lanegan had become a famous singer in the band the Screaming Trees which was one of 20th century’s most explosive and loud hardcore bands to come from the Pacific Northwest that brought forth the likes of Nirvana and Mudhoney, amongst others. Greg Dulli was a magnetic leader of the band the Afghan Whigs. He was also a shining (black) light from the 1990s rock era.

The Whigs were not only the first non-Northwestern band to sign to Sub Pop Records but they had also proven to be one of the most idol bands of the era (in its list of the top 100 SPIN placed the Whigs’ breakthrough album Gentlemen at number 99). The powerful and heavy psychedelic sounds of the Trees and the holy, psychosexual deep and soulful rock sounds of the Whigs has proven to be different yet in a strange way it parallels how both groups mimicked the times, yet went beyond them in their revolt.

With the split of both the Whigs and Screaming Trees at the end of the ’90s: Lanegan and Dulli went on to be significantly noticed for their achievement. Saturnalia is wild through Dulli and Lanegan’s gruesome expression. There is a fusion of Middle Eastern exoticism with shocking guitar riffs that shoot from AC/DC through to the emotions of Pink Floyd, and a primal essence like that of John Lennon.

The Gutter Twins – Greg Dulli and Mark Lanegan will perform in Melbourne this Friday, 24th July 2009
at the Athenaeum Theatre, doors open at 7pm.

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
- Oscar Wilde

No. 32 – The Gutter Twins Saturnalia

No big surprise that the long-awaited collaboration between ’90s-vintage gloom kings Mark Lanegan and Greg Dulli wasn’t exactly the feel-good hit of the year. But the former’s narcoleptic, baritone moan and the latter’s mischievous, soulful wail give these mid-tempo dirges, awash in revelations and Revelation, a touch of grace that recalls their classic work without repeating it. The most upbeat moment: the synthy “Idle Hands,” in which the word suffer pops up only four times. S.K

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Greg Dulli and Mark Lanegan have a consistently touch-and-go, seemingly fickle collaborative past. Lanegan appears here and there on Dulli’s Twilight Singers material, hardly at the helm, often in the background. The two have been flirting with the idea of The Gutter Twins for the past couple years, with news popping up here and there that Lanegan was touring with Dulli as The Gutter Twins. Their idea has culminated, finally, in their debut album “Saturnalia.”

Like the Twilight Singers LPs and the Afghan Whigs before them whom Dulli fronted throughout the ‘90s, the sound of “Saturnalia” is a dark pop coupled with the sultry sound of a demented soul singer’s outfit. Lanegan and Dulli lead a band rich and versatile in sound — angrily blazed-out one minute, then sentimental and gentle the next. “Saturnalia” is evidence that Dulli has mastered the craft of displaying his hedonistic demons, and Lanegan’s prickly vocals and participatory songwriting deepens, emboldens, I suppose, what he and Dulli had in mind for the album and their collaboration as a whole.

“The Stations” opens the album. Swirling minor chords enveloped by strings and organs burst behind lyrics inviting whatever impending fatalism may come: “Oh children, this is where they come to take me away. I don’t know what they mean,” then, ultimately, a dead refrain. From “The Stations,” we know that what haunts on this album, haunts thoroughly.

One track will disclose the trials of the body, while the next concerns itself with absolution. “Idle Hands,” the track in the middle of the album, confesses justly that indeed, idle hands are the devil’s playthings: “My idle hands, there’s nothing I can do,” Lanegan opens the song. “Let your hands do what they will do,” Dulli sings on the unsurprisingly catchy chorus. “Idle Hands” postulates an idea of volition and free will set against striking, distorted strums and chant-like grunts that guide the verses of the track into those large choruses.

The beginning of “Seven Stories Underground” sounds like it was lifted from Tom Waits’ “Rain Dogs” carnivalesque timbre. Then the track turns into a confessional, proclamatory gospel anthem: “Oh Heaven, is quite a climb, is quite a climb.”

These songs focus on the human condition, provide a thematic battle of sorts against any inner impiety, imploring the validity of self-goodness or, if not, an excuse for any bad deeds. The world and mood that the album implies is a dystopia, with struggle and temptation as the means to forgiveness and redemption. The constant is the idea that faced with trial and error, your deliverance, your decision in the midst of struggle and temptation, marks your status of good or bad, holy or evil. “Saturnalia” evokes these ideas humbly, humanly, not at all loftily.

Longtime masters of sun-goes-down music, the duo have created one of those very rare albums that would make you happy to see shorter days. For either man each of these 12 journeys to the dark end of the street warrants a place on a Best Of and the atmosphere of love, lust and religious references they lure you into is so addictive that you’d scour the Internet for the outakes, the unfinished and the cast-offs.

There are rockers (‘God’s Children’, ‘Idle Children’), ballads (‘I Was in Love with You’, ‘The Body’) and dirges (‘All Misery/Flowers’, ‘Bete Noire’), stunning duets (‘Front Street’, ‘Who Will Lead Us’) and a guitar solo so maniacal that any metal overlord would be thrilled to call it theirs. And with every listen grows the feeling that this is far too great to be a one-off.

One of the best reasons to remember 2008.

Harry Guerin

Has Greg Dulli found religion? Its hard not to think so after hearing Saturnalia, the debut record from his long-in-gestation collaboration with Mark Lanegan, where the two dark lords of alt-rock sing of regret, redemption and, well, God. Practically every song is filled with religious and Biblical imagery, some literal album-opener “The Stations,” where lyrics about the Rapture butt up against the title itself, a reference to the Catholic Stations of the Cross and others, like the gorgeous “The Body,” more metaphorical.

But Dulli, late of the Afghan Whigs and taking a busmans holiday from his current band, The Twilight Singers, and ex-Screaming Trees frontman Lanegan — himself involved in projects as diverse as Queens Of The Stone Age and two records of ballads with with Belle and Sebastians Isobel Campbell — are looking at the Pearly Gates from a spot way down below. Sufjan Stevens or Pedro The Lion this aint. For ever note about resurrection and spiritual redemption, were reminded that “Heaven is quite a climb/From seven stories underground.” Dullis feral soul stud is outgunned here by Lanegans grim reaper persona— when the latter sings in the apocalyptic “All Misery/Flowers,” “little girls might twitch at the way I itch/But when I burn its a son of a bitch… I did it all just to get through to Heaven,” you pretty much expect the Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse to add a fifth rider to their posse.

Dulli and Lanegan play off well together, with Dullis expressive soul-man crooning bashing up against Lanegans sandpaper growl; the songs are structured that, when the two trade off vocals mid-song in “The Stations” and in the records strongest track, the soaring “Circle The Fringes,” the shift in tone only amps up the songs dramatic quotient — its like hearing The Righteous Brothers by way of early Alice Cooper.

Saturnalia works best when the duo arent trying to hard to impress — the busy-sounding, electronica-tinged “Each To Each” leaves Lanegans bark sticking out like a sore thumb. But stripped-down numbers like Lanegans surprisingly soulful “Who Will Lead Us?” and Dullis harrowing, acoustic “Front Street” show the two at their most relaxed Dulli has thankfully ditched the vocal processing that got in the way of the power of his pipes on the last couple of Twilight Singers records. Rocker “Idle Hands” — with Arabic-sounding strings gliding over a thudding, hellbent-for-leather rhythm track — puts the two at maximum comfort level with a sound that hearkens back to both the Screaming Trees and early Whigs songs like “Hated” or “Conjure Me.”

Dulli and Lanegan may see God ahead of them, but they still have hellhounds on their trail: “With my idle hands/Theres nothing I can do,” Lanegan snarls, “But be the Devils plaything, baby/And know that Ive been used.” Dark and bracing, Saturnalia is the perfect record for that lapsed Catholic in your life.

Mark Cappelletty

Greg Dulli is a hot dog, a fast-talking soul boy whose giddy literate lyricism made his dippy punkish Afghan Whigs the oddball toast of Sub Pop’s early-’90s label establishment. By the time Dulli got to the harder, groovier stuff (literally, in regard to his addiction-addled chatter) of the Twilight Singers, he couldn’t shut the speed rapping even when slowing down for his best effort, 2006’s Powder Burns. Mark Lanegan is a slower-burning ember. But it’s a measuredly wordy brushblaze Lanegan’s tossed gasoline onto so far: raging across the SST (and, later, Epic) landscape for the grueling grunge of Screaming Trees, then submitting a series of immensely wrenching emotional vocals to everyone from Queens of the Stone Age, Isobel Campbell and Soulsavers to his own efforts (notably 2004’s Bubblegum, his warmest solo work).

In full possession of his goods and his ghosts, then, Lanegan also sung on his best bud Dulli’s Twilight Singers’ 2006 EP A Stitch in Time. But Gutter Twins is the rich impressionistic meeting and melding of the wronged and wronging minds in real time. Fire, meet ice; cocaine, meet heroin.

Like a searing cross between “Gimme Shelter” and “Kashmir,” a song like “The Stations” rises as it rings, its singed guitars and rolling rhythms epically bolstering down and at once lifting their talk of the godly and the pleading. It’s a bountiful, prayerful beginning and a gorgeous portent of what’s to come as their voices, scuffed and silvery, blend often as one. While “Who Will Lead Us?” does its ethereally bluesy and (mostly) acoustic best to mumble out loud about where the chariot will park and how much the fee might be, “Seven Stories Underground” uses its dense electronic pucker and percussive clack to match the might of a woman’s mouth to that of Heaven above. From the high-pitched magical mystery whirr and mumbled romanticism of Dulli’s “I Was in Love With You” to Lanegan’s holy dread, strum and thud of “All Misery/Flowers,” Saturnalia is as if conjoined twins, once separated, had been—corny, but true—united at the soul.

Their menacing solo voices may seem plucked and struck from the same, sometimes sentimental, center. But when they sing at once in rancid harmony, it’s as if the Everlys had died and gone to Purgatory to play out their darkest days before the big decision.
By A. D. Amorosi

You won’t find a more appropriate new band name than The Gutter Twins.

It’s music mired in grime, with spiritual imagery swirling amid the dark Gothic overtones and disparate vocals of alt-rock’s two most indulgent figureheads, Greg Dulli and Mark Lanegan.

The stellar collaboration has been several years in the making, and whatever led to its delay helped give the final product a real sense of purpose.

From Lanegan that could probably be expected. The former Screaming Trees (“Nearly Lost You”) frontman’s primeval growl dominates whether singing lead or background vocals. Couple that with Dulli’s (Afghan Whigs, Twilight Singers) sex-soaked croon and it’s a flawless juxtaposition for an album filled with songs about good and evil, hope and violence, sanctity and sin.

While the building crescendo in “Idle Hands” is “Saturnalia’s” standout moment, opening track “The Stations” is a prime starting point. It’s the perfect collision of sound and fury.

The track moves like an ominous storm cloud, the black and blacker of Lanegan and Dulli’s vocals intensifying before the entire sky is cloaked in darkness. Lyrically, it gathers the same sense of impending doom (“I hear the Rapture’s coming/They say he’ll be here soon/Right now there’s demons crawling/All around my room.”) while strings, guitar and drums thrash about in a sinister chorus.

Then, just as quickly as the storm comes, everything fades. Redemption will arrive another day.

With a clearly defined pedigree, it was fairly certain how cut and dry “Saturnalia” would sound, even before the first listen. Dulli’s ethyl soaked croon, sounds like history’s deepest falsetto next to Lanegan’s fathoms deep growl. Living up to their own billing, and all reasonable expectation, Lanegan and Dulli deliver a release that’s two parts goth and 10 parts soul.

The light (Dulli) and dark (Lanegan) dichotomy is the napalm for “Saturnalia’s” flames. From the first listen, “Saturnalia” crackles in the speakers and songs about love, lust, damnation and redemption (however scarce) are stuck in the listener’s head. Clinging to their sinister claims, the Gutter Twins are devilishly clever songwriters, churning out songs that are equally dense as they are catchy.

Listeners might find it hard to picture themselves singing along with Dulli on the opening track “The Stations” as he sings, “I hear the rapture’s coming; they say he’ll be here soon/ Right now there’s demons crawling all around my room,” yet after one listen, they’ll be humming it for days.

It may be perhaps pre-mature to anoint “Saturnalia” as 2008′s best anything, but it is far more than likely that it will be near the top of many lists come December. There’s something exceedingly dark and troubling behind “Saturnalia’s” infectious charm. A tangible darkness hangs over each note of each melody. The listener will at times want to dance, while at others, crawl under the nearest set of covers and hide.

This is rock ‘n roll at it’s best and most damning. “Saturnalia” is exactly what one would expect form the self proclaimed “Satanic Everly Brothers”. To sum it up in three words: Get Saturnalia NOW!

Music: 4.5/5 Sound: 4/5 “Must Hear”

Rumored for more than five years and hinted at via a succession of collaborations, the prospect of the Gutter Twins – a partnership between inimitable vocalists Mark Lanegan and Greg Dulli – has until now existed as more of a tantalizing fantasy than a formal entity. Not that the pair hasn’t given reasons to believe.

Both artists have histories of helping a brother out. Dulli assisted on Lanegan’s Bubblegum album and sat behind the piano for a subsequent tour; Lanegan cut several tracks with Dulli’s Twilight Singers and has often joined the band onstage. Aside from a one-off Gutter Twins gig, these moments were the closest anyone came to experiencing what the two-headed beast might resemble if it ever became reality. In retrospect, it seems the frontmen understood the value of an old showbiz rule: give audiences a taste by stoking desires and teasing curiosities, but make them wait. What a concept.

A triumph of great art over anticipation and expectation, Saturnalia, named after an ancient Roman festival at which the social order of slaves and masters were reversed, finds Dulli and Lanegan in peak form, the singers reaching for transcendental deliverance while contemplating heaven, hell, temptation, and salvation amidst ominous sonic surroundings. Religious references and menacing atmospherics are nothing new to either Lanegan, the former Screaming Trees singer whose solo efforts brood about mood and mortality, or Dulli, the ex-Afghan Whigs leader intimately familiar with guilt, revenge, and personal demons. Yet recurring streaks of spirituality present in the lyrics and music also push the Gutter Twins in a cathartic direction whereby pleas for redemption and forewarnings of inescapable fate alternately swirl with fear and desperation, celebration, and resilience.

Both vocalists trade off between lead and background duties, each showcasing trademark strengths – Dulli letting loose with his soulful falsetto and sensual croon, Lanegan adding emotional weight with a deep baritone croak and sturdy, nicotine-pollinated rasp – to complementary and contrasting effect. Moreover, their propensity to change up vocal patterns on every one of the record’s dozen tunes reflects both the pair’s potent chemistry and music’s striking diversity.

Supported by a host of accompanists – vocalist Martina Topley-Bird, indie singer-songwriter Joseph Arthur, and multiple Queens of the Stone Age members/contributors are among the guests – the Gutter Twins play a melodic assortment of modal folk, gritty blues, swampy trance, tribal electronica, and R&B-fused rock. Middle Eastern textures, reverse loops, and exotic instrumentation contribute to the album’s otherworldly feel. Each narrative conjures its own set of mysteries and revelations.

The opening “The Stations” tells of the arrival of an imminent rapture. Slithering guitar lines, somber cellos, and marching beats preceding a climactic “oh, children” call – the cry simultaneously referencing the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” and underscoring one of Saturnalia’s running themes. “Idle Hands” sounds like a throw down between biblical adversaries inside an ancient temple, all swagger and sway until a hail-splitting guitar solo makes clear that reckoning day is night. Similarly, “Bette Noire” intimidates with cavernous vocals, sinister lyrics and lurching grooves. The latter, along with a limitless supply of gripping pop hooks and absorbing riffs, link the stripped-down and electric fare. The Gutter Twins are equally deadly and intuitive on slower material. “Seven Stories Underground” clangs away to junkyard-heap percussion. The equally stunning “I Was in Love With You” slowly turns from light to dark, dazzling with psychedelic chamber strings and heartbreaking beauty.

Aptly, the record unfolds as a series of mis-en-scene soundscapes. Dulli has long stamped his projects with cinematic grandness, and the ambitious results here speak to his auteur visions. He makes no small plans. Vocals are clear and direct; songs prize enveloping ambience, distinct tones, defined spaces, and reverberant acoustics. While heavily layered, the record exhales with human timbres and analog warmth.

Nowhere is such intimacy more evident than on the shivering ballad “Front Street,” Dulli stepping into a subversive role as teh devil’s plaything in acerbic detail singing “I am old as the star that bears you/Black as the bitch who wears you, tears you/Rips you apart and then turns it around” with the malicious intent and soul-stealing determination of someone who has no time – or want – for salvation.

By Don Baird
The brilliant duo of Mark Lanegan and Greg Dulli

I’ve had access to downloading much more music from the Internet lately, and there have been a few new releases by bands of interest. One that was garnering a great deal of attention when I was in London with a couple very well received live U.K. debut dates was The Gutter Twins, a long-time-coming collaboration between Mark Lanegan (of Screaming Trees, Queens of The Stoneage) and Greg Dulli (Afghan Wigs, The Twilight Singers). Their first record together is entitled Saturnalia, and it marks the 20-year anniversary and return to the Sub-pop label for both artists whose first bands debuted there.

I mention this mainly because I’ve always felt like The Screaming Trees were a completely under-recognized part of the whole sub-pop northwest music scene. They released a score of very strong psychedelic wall-of-sound miasmic stoner rock LPs that more than properly showcased the developing vocal prowess of Lanegan as he slid naturally into his world-weary smoke and whiskey, bruised and soulful style. He arguably has one of rock and rolls’ most beautifully mournful and hard living damaged voices – steady, smooth and going down. He’s sexy and brooding and dark. I don’t know as much about Greg Dulli’s career and music, but it seems he traveled a similar path from a hard rocking beginning to a more vocal specific focus and a concentration on soul influences. I know his voice finds the registers on the higher end of the scale. Saturnalia, the album title, is the name of an ancient Roman celebration or festival marked by tomfoolery and reversal of social roles, in which slaves and masters ostensibly switched places.

It seems this pairing up has had the indie kids supergroup excited for quite some time, and it has been said that Lanegan’s apparent battles with substance abuse have been conquered and he came to the aid of Dulli for guidance out of a similar situation. I’ll try not to hold that against them and re-iterate that this might only be a rumor. I often dislike the effect an artist’s road to recovery can have on their music, but it’s different for everyone, I guess.

On first listening I found that perhaps Dulli’s most apparent influence as a collaborator are the lush instrumentations and complex arrangements, often using strings and multiple layers of vocals, creating moody but precise and tightly arranged compositions, each song kind of standing on its own and varying in style in a mini-epic way. Yhe songs are high on drama and deep into some pretty desolate emotional wastelands. The disc’s opening cut, “The Stations,” is a spooky dirge about crucifixion or Armageddon or the rapture, and it features the line, “There but for the grace of God go I,” which I’ve always loved. If this is the beginning of a journey, it’s starting out at a pretty loaded foreboding point.

The second song is “All God’s Children,” and I start to see this is a spiritual journey we’re on, the intro sounding a bit like Led Zeppelins’ “In My Time of Dying.” But it unfolds into a gentle lilting song that grows in intensity and sounds lush with backing vocals, very produced. I’m wondering if this is a Christian record as opposed to a rehab record. “All Misery Flowers” then comes sparsely pounding in with a tale of lengthy torturous love. Lanegan’s voice rasps low and steady in that perfect way that makes him so great, and the music builds to a gradual swelling tension with eerie whale-like sounds that remind me of that Pink Floyd song “Echoes.”

After an underwhelming cut called “The Body,” yet another obvious religious reference for a pretty dull romantic sounding song, the disc kicks in to its strongest stretch of songs. “Idle Hands” opens with a bombastic choral arrangement lifted from some biblical epic soundtrack, and Arabian strings wrap around Mark Lanegan’s best vocal so far. He just has a magnificent voice that has matured and strikes an unwavering new level of emotion and richness. “Circle The Fringes” continues on with a wash of crying violins, then a pleasant waltz-like bass that starts feeling haunted and creepy. Then Lanegan sings, “It’s all right to take me down/Between the hook and the line I took/ It’s all right to drag the lake/ And find the things you love.” Now that’s some wicked songwriting, and the rest of the lyrics are chilling and blunt and have a sense of darkness and diminishing faith and hope. It’s a plunge into a very abysmal and conflicted and scary journey and one you most certainly weren’t expecting to be anything like a fun loving, feel good record of the year based on the works of these two troubled and talented troubadours.

I must admit that after a few songs I started to be bothered by the fact that this record was so entirely filled with biblical references and redemption and the quest for spiritual guidance, and that whole good versus evil thing. It was sort of like when Dylan went Christian or something. It was kind of the last thing I expected from a record made by these two rock and roll outlaws, a story replete with angelic visions and meetings with Gabriel and cries for redemption at Heaven’s gate.

But ultimately the thing that comes through in each of these songs is a completely enveloping emotional engagement. You hear these songs for what they are, and Lanegan and Dulli deliver them with such a masterful and concise collaborative effort that they never fail to connect with the desired point, the gut or heart of the dread, longing, confusion, pain and release of this apparent story. It feels more like a bonafide rock opera than I anticipated, with character development and a definite cinematic quality. Especially on the cut “Bete Noire,” Lanegan sounds like he’s preaching a sermon to lost disciples about Icarus and self destruction and an organ accompaniment gives a ghostly gospel feel while his vocal is smooth and alluring, very sexy, like the hell he warns about is someplace you would follow him down to when your “wings of sin like Icarus will fall.” A voyage of the damned and his voice could lull anyone there, like the serpent in Eden.

By the final cut, “Front Street,” the epic feeling of Saturnalia comes full circle when a couple of simple touches bring to mind one of rock and roll’s most famous rock operas, The Wall by Pink Floyd. At the song’s intro you hear birds chirping, and then they actually drop the phrase “comfortably numb” into one of the most lyrically powerful verses in the entire collection of songs. These are pretty brazen references, and this isn’t the first time Pink Floyd came to mind while listening to Saturnalia. In a sense there are quite a few similarities between the two works, but Saturnalia almost sticks to more traditional religious and mythological themes in spinning a tale of self-discovery, redemption and release. Even though the themes are familiar, it’s definitely a trip worth taking.