For their second album, which follows Black Pudding released in 2013, Mark Lanegan and Duke Garwood haven’t moved away from their dark, foggy and thick blues. Even the album cover of With Animals is sealed from the light and displays tortured, ghostly characters. With his deep Tom Waits-like voice, Lanegan leads a slow and heavy funeral march, coming to weigh on consciences as with Feast To Famine where he states that he’s “good for the damage". For this album, which was recorded in Los Angeles, Pasadena and Joshua Tree, the American and British artists aren’t here in a search of musical performance. What remains important is the weight and impact of the words; the effects of internal emotions. We have here twelve tracks that seem to merge with the twelve nocturnal hours, each one like a progression into the darkness and the different atmospheres of the night. We find a melancholic acoustic ballad with Upon Doing Something Wrong, psychedelic distortions on Scarlett and even a dance of maracas on Spaceman. It’s a dark journey that turns out to be much more pleasant than one might think. © Clara Bismuth/Qobuz