SCREAMING TREES - LIVE REVIEW FROM 1996
(Post prompted by the sad loss of Mark Lanegan: From Melody Maker 16th November 1996 - headlined 'Aye There's The Shrub' which is atrocious but kinda likeable)
SCREAMING TREES
Newcastle Riverside (UK)
For a gig you might've expected to be a pissed-up, beery slop, all bum-notes and chaos, it's all in the subtleties of feel. This is the only way you can explain why Screaming Trees will never be a household name writ large across a million T-shirts.
They have made the best rock album of the year - no question - and the confines of this place should be too small for their global anthems-in-waiting. You can see no earthly reason why they aren't the biggest rock band on the planet; you realise how Chris Cornell or Eddie Vedder or even James Hetfield would kill to write anything that's played tonight. It feels impertinent to be 10 feet from the stage; you feel you ought to be two miles back and craning your neck over a sea of hands out there. This is like standing next to God at a urinal, bumping into Krishna down the launderette. And you have to find a reason, Why here, why now? And the answer's deep snobbishness doesn't matter.
Screaming Trees are just too good to be huge, to be spread thin. This music, these songs, are too hard fought for to have the immediate simplicity MTV and its raw teen audience require. I'm not saying the huge audience the Trees should have are simply too stupid to grasp them; I think they're just too young to fully identify with Mark Lanegan's mordant bitterness, his almost mystical resignation.
Everything is in place tonight for Just Another Rock Show, but the Trees, perversely (naturally) have to take things beyond the simple stimulus-response of riff and power and into something approaching magic and mathematics. "Shadow Of The Season", which kicks off tonight, is just too dark, too pulverisingly propelled to have ever been their "Teen Spirit", no matter how much you might want it to be. "Nearly Lost You" soon follows, a constant skipped groove of explosions and fades, while "Halo Of Ashes" rises horribly/wonderfully out of itself, shedding its rhythmic weight to cruise a wave of pure, stunningly executed feedback for a good minute, leaving the moshpit static, shocked in awe. "Dollar Bill" wrings tears from our drunken lungs; "All I Know" has Gary Conner writhing like a child in his own genius; "Butterfly" reminding too many of us of '92 and nights lost in sweet oblivion. "Make My Mind" launches itself, so blazing with heart-tugging hooks you're left gasping at Lanegan's steely nonchalance in its whirlpool, "The Secret Kind" and "Winter Song" take you to the point of emotional exhaustion before "Gospel Plow" finishes you off, speechless and hopeless now, just scattered around like a leaf, mouth lolling in abject surrender.
Hell, maybe it's just bad luck, airplay, image, the usual. Me, I'm filing Screaming Trees next to those bands beamed in from Venus whose sheer greatness seemed to actually stop them at the door to the success they deserved; Rex, Thin White Rope, Shudder To Think, Shiva Burlesque. Tonight was an intimate, heart-stopping lurve-thang and I'd like to keep it that way. When they get Xmas Number One, feel free to scoff at my repellent elitism. This is a beautiful, beautiful thing. This is unforgettable.
Neil Kulkarni