Hear Mark Lanegan Band’s ‘Riot in My House’ Single

Mark Lanegan, who’s been underground forever and has recently collaborated with Queens of the Stone Age, throws a crazy party in his band’s new single ‘Riot in My House.’ There’s “burnouts by the score,” a trill piano note, a searing guitar lead, and some really strange imagery.

At once old and new school, the track splits the difference and falls somewhere in between. It’s familiar yet dangerous, like an old sweater full of broken glass. The heavy rock sound is satisfying, though the lyrics are edgy-boring: Try this piece of the chorus on for size.

“Mama bring my medication / I’m performing levitation / Realize that I’m slowly coming down again.”

The song is interesting in the sense of being like almost any guitar-rock song you’ve ever heard. Timeless in a way, the song could have come out of the ’70s or ’80s, but in actuality the album, ‘Blues Funeral,’ doesn’t drop until May. The sound is like if Iron Maiden flourished in the nu-metal era of the early ‘00s and got together with a really slick producer — or if Bruce Dickinson, instead of writing about Rudyard Kipling, wrote about drug drips and haunted houses.

This part of the ‘Blues Funeral’ is nice enough to hear — but maybe not to listen to.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.