Gutter Twins

More than a decade after individual indie-rock canonization and years into mutual admiration, it was somehow inevitable that Greg Dulli and Mark Lanegan would unite their devilish brands of rock 'n' roll gloom into a single bete noire. Lanegan's Screaming Trees and Dulli's Afghan Whigs were among the initial graduates of the Sub Pop School of Doomed Guitars, helping define "alternative" and "Seattle" for pop-culture historians. But rather than get stale with the grunge generation, each man pursued a muse of personal choice: Lanegan expanded the scope of his darkness on solo albums and with frequent, disparate musical partners, while Dulli perfected his soul-crooner/bad-attitude persona as leader of the Twilight Singers. The Gutter Twins house both tendencies. Having first collaborated on the Singers' Blackberry Belle in '03, they spent five on-off years coming up with the dozen numbers included on Saturnalia. And whereas Dulli's inner rock poet majestically dubbed their sound "satanic Everly Brothers," the truth is that it sounds like the two old souls they've always seemed, making emotional, sweeping rock 'n' roll in the vein of their (in)famous old bands. No more, no less.