Album: Mark Lanegan Band, Blues Funeral (4AD)

Not a blues album, but an album borrowing heavily from the bank of blues tonality: minor keys, draggy tempos, undecorated structures, an implicit sense of what it is to be enslaved.

Plus the sense of gothic bleakness which makes Lanegan records what they are (as opposed to Nick Cave ones). It was recorded in Hollywood, which figures – there is a near-visual sense of overstatement to the bleakness which may or may not appeal to the gut.