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When bands end unceremoniously, the leftover studio recordings and scraps of ideas can serve as a Rosetta stone for fans seeking an answer to the eternal question, “Why did my band break up?” Screaming Trees have posthumously been recognized as one of the best bands of the cliched-as-it-happened genre of grunge, and Last Words: The Final Recordings offers a glimpse into the last days of this great band.
It’s best if you not think about Dust, the band’s final record, and perhaps their finest artistic achievement. For that record, the band delved down into the annals of rock and roll and surfaced with a record that was hard, painful, and uneasy, yet was ultimately true to form, and showed that the adversity they had been through had produced beautiful, compelling fruit. That the packaging and artwork looked so cheaply produced, and that their label hardly promoted the record only shows that the Screaming Trees—and the “Seattle sound” in general—was no longer a concern. After a laborious tour, the band split, and like many other bands of the era—no one really cried over the loss.
Last Words isn’t Dust, or even close. Because these songs were recorded as a demo in order to garner label interest, there’s a rawness to the proceedings, but the band’s virtues—the ability to make powerful, epic songs that captured stripped-down, naked, vulnerable emotion—are unable to cover up the sound of a rudderless band. These tracks aren’t boring, but the band definitely sounds bored. Opening song “Ash Gray Sunday,” states, quite bluntly, in a voice that sounds strangely distant, “I never felt so empty inside/I can’t find the tears to cry,” and it’s hard to not quickly assume that vocalist Mark Lanegan is offering up his final state-of-the-union address for his group. The adjective “forgettable” didn’t turn up often in reviews for Screaming Trees records, but some of the songs here are definitely more for the completest and the hardcore.
But, yet, an odd glimmer of what could have been: “Reflections” and “Low Life,” in their stripped-down form, sound a helluva lot like Whiskeytown and the burgeoning alt.country boom that would really take off. Could the Trees have pulled off a genre switch, continuing on, carving out a legacy? Or was their scattering the better fate for them? Lanegan would go on to carve a niche for himself as a solo artist, and as a collaborator with like-minded artists, whilst beating the demons that nearly beat him.
Many thought Mark Lanegan would ultimately be a casualty, a la Layne Staley. Instead, he kicked his habits, he continued to make music, and as a result has become an elder statesman—a well-deserved role for this overwlemingly talented man. Last Words isn’t always pretty, and may not be the band’s best recordings, it does show that perhaps the band’s demise was a blessing in disguise. (Sunyata Records)
