Mojo Magazine
September 2009
www.mojo4music.com

BACK TO THE GRANITE
Mark Lanegan's stone-clad voice is the star of Soulsavers' Mojo Club turn, reckons Chris Catchpole.

There comes a point during tonight's show where it becomes apparent that Mark Lanegan hasn't moved all evening. Clinging to the mikestand and swathed in purple light, he certainly looks the former Screaming Trees vocalist, yet apart from occasionally closing his eyes every sinew of his body remains static. Then again, who needs motor neurone function when that voice is emanating from front-of-stage.
Sounding like it was hewn from granite sometime in the 1860s and left to mature in a vat of malt whiskey, Lanegan is gifted with a larynx most singers - contemporary or otherwise - would happily sell their toes to possess. Indeed, the sheer force of character in his excess-worn growl seems to have expunged the idea of Rich Machin's Soulsavers as a project with a rotating cast of singers and led his newly assembled band to trade - onstage at any rate - almost exclusively in the thick, narco-drenched swamp rock that suits Lanegan so well. In fact, such is tonight's submission to molten-lead blues and redemption-seeking gospel that it's hard to reconcile Machin's past life as a purveyor of smoky, after-hours electronica.
It's a move with which the packed house at Islington's recently-rechristened 'Relentless' Garage have no qualms. Following some stirring support from Steve Gullick's scuzzy four-piece Tenebrous Liar and Australia's Red Ghost (aka Rosa Agostino, who lends some smoky vocal texture to Soulsavers' latest album, Broken), Machin and Lanegan deliver selections culled on the whole from Soulsavers' two most recent LPs. Ghosts of You and Me nails the lotus-eating menace Alabama 3 continually strive for; Death Bells ups the sleaze stakes and - prehaps best of all - a Cortez the Killer-style reading of Gene Clark's Some Misunderstanding swathes anguished pleas for forgiveness in expertly rafted feedback. Lanegan leaves the stage for haunting penultimate track By My Side, and the reception that greets his return suggests that Soulsavers are now as much 'his' band as '90s grunge nabobs the Screaming Trees once were.
Frankly, if it results in more evenings like this, that's no bad thing.