The Gutter Twins, Saturnalia

I’m sorely tempted to milk a well-worn cliché and call this a marriage made in Hell, but not only is that trite and overdone, it doesn’t really do justice to Saturnalia, the much-anticipated collaboration between two of rock’s rawest-yet-most-charismatic frontmen, Mark Lanegan and Greg Dulli. At first blush, the pairing of the two feels like it’s probably fueled more by a shared history of tangles with booze, drugs, and almost-made-it superstardom, but that overlooks the fact that the duo’s been working together since 2000 or so in various incarnations. From even a cursory listen to Saturnalia, it becomes apparent that Dulli and Lanegan have gotten real comfortable with one another artistically.

The music, though, is honestly more Dulli than Lanegan, harking back at several points to Black Love-era Afghan Whigs, except that this time the gospel-party punch has been spiked with bad acid and everybody’s started freaking out. And really, that’s not a bad thing. It’s gloomy, murky, and dangerous, like a long, weird night spent with shifty characters when you’re not sure you’ve got a way out; they could well cut your throat and leave you dead in a gutter somewhere, but if they don’t, it’s bound to be a night to remember. This is like Dulli’s long-held vision of the Whigs’ sound all gone horribly, jaw-droppingly wrong.

The tension starts with the dark, threatening “The Stations,” where Lanegan’s throaty growl establishes that the two mean serious business, and burns hotter and deeper on through the swaggering, almost funky “God’s Children,” where Dulli feels like he’s alternately beckoning and warning you away. “All Misery/Flowers” is thundering and near-religious, with Lanegan sounding like a bad man come undone who’s ready for forgiveness but not entirely prepared to repent. Things back off just a bit with “The Body,” a sweeter, more delicate track featuring subtly cool guest vocals from Martina Topley-Bird, but then the Twins slam the whole thing home with “Idle Hands,” Saturnalia‘s centerpiece and the holy-fuck moment of the disc.

The song’s mean and menacing, starting off with oddly Eastern-sounding strings, distorted chanting, and Lanegan doing some kind of Tuvan throatsinging-esque hum before kicking the wall down with some raw, sleazy-ass metal guitar and drums. The damn thing just about demands that you pump your first in the air in full-on surrender to The Metal. Lanegan’s low rasp works to absolute perfection here (as it does elsewhere on here, I should note), heightened by Dulli’s higher-pitched nasal yelp and spookily atmospheric organ. It’s grand and gorgeous and terrifying, all at once.

Seriously, I’ve heard quite a few bands lately who ostensibly make “scary” music, apparently influenced by too many horror flicks and too much eyeliner, but this album flat-out blows ’em all out of the water. It’s genuinely unsettling, and in a good, can’t-break-from-the-stare kind of way. By the time the end nears, with those freaky, siren-sounding guitars, fiery solo, and eerie organ reprise, I’m shaking my head in awestruck wonderment.

Thankfully, the Twins are no one-trick ponies. Even after I recover from whatever the hell just happened to my speakers (and my head), I’m still captivated by Saturnalia‘s darkly beguiling charms. Dulli steps back in, reassuring the listener that it’s okay to, um, kill(?) him on “Circle the Fringes,” Lanegan shifts into gospel for the mournful, hopeful “Who Will Lead Us?,” even dropping the growl in favor of a more straight-ahead bluesy vocal key. And then there’s “Seven Stories Underground,” which manages to meld Tom Waits and Nick Cave with more gentle, softly pretty vocals from Lanegan, and “I Was in Love with You,” which features some awesomely shimmering, Radiohead-esque guitars and is probably the best stalker-love song since “Every Breath You Take” — taken together, the two tracks serve as a bit of a breather after all that dark, desperate shit.

And I can’t speak for everybody, but I sure as hell need it. There’s a definite weight to the music the Gutter Twins are making, here; it feels gritty and real and dangerous, a little uncomfortably close to a real-life encounter with the dark side of reality. I keep thinking of the surreal walk-on-the-bad-side parts of Training Day, where Denzel Washington’s character leads Ethan Hawke’s righteous Boy Scout cop into Hell, a twisted, homicidal Virgil showing off the seedy underbelly only to try to have his metaphorical Dante whacked. There’s a lot of sin, sin, sin here to revel in, dangerous though it might be.

The really weird thing is that, well, I like it. If Dulli and Lanegan came calling late one night, offering to drag me off to some urban nether realm, would I go, even after hearing Saturnalia? Yeah. Yeah, I think I would. Either I’m more of a voyeur than I’d guessed, or there’s something out there in the dark that appeals to all of us, somewhere deep in our souls. Somewhere down there, maybe we all secretly want to run into the hellhounds out there in the black night.