Gee muses

I’m a heretic. The best album by a Seattle band wasn’t recorded by Nirvana. Oh no. Or Pearl Jam. Nup. Soundgarden … sorry. Alice In Chains, never. No, the best album EVER recorded by a Seattle band is Dust by The Screaming Trees. A beautiful insouciant mixture of raw grunge, hard rock, psychedelia and melody driven by the fiercest rhythm section of them all, burnished with guitarist Gary Lee Conner ’s elegant licks and monster riffs and capped by the sublime vocals of Mark Lanegan. Dust was massively under-rated but was Kerrang’s album of the year in 1996.

Just as under-rated but coming out of Cincinnati, Ohio, were the Afghan Whigs, a band whose records embraced a sound that harked back to Phil Spector and delivered it’s soul-licked alt-rock with a vastness that embedded elements of every generation since Phil’s widescreen wonder. By sheer chance they were also the first non-Northwestern band to record for Seattle’s Sub Pop label. And like the Trees, their elegant muse was capped by supreme vocals - in this case those of Greg Dulli.

Turn the clock forward and Dulli and Lanegan are now the Gutter Twins, a pairing that is as perfect as it is a bed of contrasts. It’s step on from their collaborations in Dulli’s post-Wigs outfit, the thoroughly excellent, Twilight Singers, and a chance not only for two of the last 20 years’ finest singers and songwriters to bounce off each other but also for those two marvellous voices to spar with one another. Their debut album, Saturnalia, is splendid, big yet stripped back, bare yet full. Songs such as the epic God’s Children - a wonderful, haunting post-psych atmosphere that just defines rock at its most elegiac, the rumbling, brooding Circle The Fringe, the darkly shimmering I Was In Love With You, and the confessional, salvation seeking, All Misery Flowers, are as fine as anything the two men have delivered. And let’s not forget the strutting idle Hands. The Trees would have devoured this one.

Dulli is in a Los Angeles recording studio where he’s working on the next Twilight Singers album. He says fitting the voices to the Twins songs was easy once they started recording. The right places for each voice were immediately apparent and both men had stewardship over the sound.

“Mark and I have a lot in common - and a lot that’s not in common. I’m relatively certain I listen to more pop than Mark Lanegan and I’m relatively sure he listens to more avant-grade. There’s a disparateness there. He’s more of a stripped down dude. He’s more low-fi and I’m hi-fi.

“That said, we’ve never argued over a song. A song is always what it wants to be. It depends on who’s driving the car and who’s riding shotgun. He’s probably the easiest guy I’ve ever collaborated with. He has a strong point of view, he sticks to his guns, but he’s a dream to work with.”

For their Sydney and Melbourne shows, the Gutter twins are appearing in acoustic mode - Dulli, Lanegan and guitarist Dave Rosser. The set list includes songs drawn from Lanegan’s solo work, the Twilight Singers, Afghan Whigs and Screaming Trees songbooks, as well as Saturnalia.

The Twins acoustic stint both in Australia and the US has it’s point: “It’s payback really,”Dulli chuckles. “It’s because Mark prefers to do the stripped-down thing and we did 90 Gutter Twins’ shows my way - super loud. He was putting his ear plugs in from the first show. He really likes the sparse acoustic thing. He told me he could do shows like that for the rest of his life.” But the Screaming Trees could amp it up. “Yeah, but with the Screaming Trees, it was the Conner boys who drove that big loud sound.”

Which brings us to the Twilight Singers forthcoming record. It is, of course, vast.

“It sounds … all I can say is it’s faster than Powder Burns [the band's fourth album released in 2006]. Because the Gutter Twins record is mid-tempoey, I think my faster songs have moved to the front of the line. It’s a pretty big sound. I’m all about the wall of sound. Occasionally, it backfires but I’ve made 15 records now so I’m definitely driving with a legal licence.” Oddly, more of those have come in the second 10 years of his career than the first.

“I think that’s because I just became aware of time and what I was doing with my time,” Dulli says. “In the first 10 years of my professional career I fucked around a little bit … just a little bit. You know.” He laughs. And that may be something else he and Lanegan have in common. “I’m sure he’d concur,” Dulli says.

The Gutter Twins have risen.