Any list of great "lost" bands ought to have Screaming
Trees somewhere near the top. Fusing edgy,
hardcore-inspired rock with swirling, '60s-influenced
psychedelia, the band, originally from Washington
State, signed to a major label after releasing four
albums in the mid to late 1980s.
Over the course of
three more albums during the first half of the 1990s,
Screaming Trees honed their sound into a tight but edgy
conflation of bludgeoning force and raw emotion,
absorbing and re-shaping classic rock to fit their own
needs. Singer Mark Lanegan evolved into a charismatic,
soulful vocalist, and the band demonstrated its ability
to work irresistible hooks into the raw roots of its
sound. But unhappily Screaming Trees never achieved
the kind of success they deserved: despite being in the
right place at the right time to ride the immediate
post-Nevermind wave of interest in all things
flannel-shirted and noisy from the American Northwest, the band lost crucial momentum through
persistent internecine strife and substance abuse,
releasing a highly praised swan song, Dust, in 1996,
and finally calling it a day following a reunion
one-off gig four years later.
Any compilation is fraught with pitfalls: what to
include, what to exclude, what kind of running order,
etc., but Ocean of Confusion largely gets it right, if
sometimes only by default due to the overall
consistency of the band's material. Tracing a
chronological progression, it begins with a 1990 EP
track "Who Lies in Darkness," then moves on through a
selection of four tracks from 1991's Uncle Anesthesia,
which more or less captures the band's transitional
sound of the time — retaining their bludgeoning
psychedelia but tempering its rough edges with more
considered arrangements. Even when the songs don't
quite come off, they're rescued by the rolling
momentum of the band's performance in general and by
Gary Lee Connor's inventive guitar playing in
particular, combining meaty, fuzzy riffs with
spiraling but concise psychedelic solos. The seven
songs lifted from 1992's Sweet Oblivion,
however, represent the real meat of the matter.
"Shadow of the Season" simply sounds awesome, its
staccato-riff intro preceding a massive, rock-solid
rhythm and Lanegan's deep, wounded growl of a vocal.
Here the band's scrappier, fuzzed-up past is fused
with timeless, monolithic rock, yielding triumphant
results: the seismic shuffle of "Nearly Lost You" was
also featured on the "Singles" soundtrack and was the
closest the band came to a hit, while "Dollar Bill"
sounds like Tim Rose fronting Hüsker Dü, with
Lanegan's hoarse, tender vocals rising to an anguished
peak to meet Lee Connor's massive guitar climax.
"ESK," a contemporaneous non-album B side, is also
included, though it's not quite up to the standard of
the other Sweet Oblivion tracks.
Two previously unreleased songs from
an aborted follow-up album session with Don Fleming,
"Watchpocket Blues" and "Paperback Bible," fill in the
chronology and are attractive bait for fans who might
otherwise already have all this material. But they
sound a bit vague, and Lanegan's voice is particularly
strained, while the music itself comes over as a
rather ordinary derivation of Zeppelinesque riffing.
Fortunately the band came back from a lengthy hiatus
with Dust in 1996. The sound was more polished and the
hooks more evident, but although the album received
copious critical appraisal at the time, here its songs
sound relatively subdued. Two of the five songs from
Dust collected here are ballads, and there's a sense
that this emphasis is an attempt to align these
latter-day Trees songs more closely with Lanegan's solo
career, something echoed in the accompanying
sleeve notes. But it means Ocean of Confusion ends on a
quieter note than it perhaps should. Certainly the ode
to dissolution that is "Dying Days" sounds suitably
fired up, but the swathes of Mellotron bubbling up all
over "The Traveler" are, to my mind, too ornamental,
and an anticlimactic note on which to finish.
Ocean of Confusion is a reasonable primer,
particularly if combined with SST's Anthology of the
band's earlier work. But to experience Screaming Trees
in their prime, listeners are urged to get hold of a
copy of Sweet Oblivion, and turn up the volume.
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