For the Record #5 welcomes our very first guest writer and it’s none other than Blitzen Trapper’s Marty Marquis!

We asked Marty to tell us about one of his favorite Sub Pop releases and Marty, being the good guy he is, took the time to write a little bit about how Mark Lanegan’s The Winding Sheet came into his favor. Accordingly, we are going to continue our practice of drastically discounting our writer’s selected title for the next 48 hours. For the Record is in full swing now, and it’s all for you dear Sub Pop fans, all for you.

All right, let’s hear from Marty!

Band: Mark Lanegan
Record: The Winding Sheet
When we told you the first time: May 1st, 1990

When I was 17 I worked on a Scout camp at Goose prairie in the middle Cascades. With my first paycheck I bought a discman and some cheap speakers and a copy of Mark Lanegan’s The Winding Sheet, and for the next nine weeks my tent was haunted by it. A spooky, forlorn record perfectly pitched to the sound of rain on canvas, the smell of splintered cedar, the dawn fogs on the prairie. The songs, sinister and melancholy, seemed to resonate with the night forest, the swift seething of the Bumping river, the silent spirals off my cigarette.

I had known and admired Lanegan from his work with Screaming Trees, but this music was bewitching in a new way; dueling with heavy wah-guitar and feedback his voice had been impressive, but the dark folk blues concocted by he and Mike Johnson here were a brilliant change of venue. I had never heard anything like it, and to this day believe it to be a first step toward a distinctively Northwestern pastoral. This from the grunge lab of Jack Endino, with performances by Fisk, Novoselic, Cobain! And is that cover art by Charles Peterson?

-MM

You get The Winding Sheet at our FTR sale price of $6 CD/$4 Mp3 here for the next 48 hours!

You can also go here to get Blitzen Trapper’s newly released (as of 8/25/09) Black River Killer EP!