Recorded last winter on the heels of a disastrous tour with his band the Screaming Trees, a drug bust and a stint in rehab, Mark Lanegan's third solo album often sounds like a hangover that's never going to go away. But there's something else happening, too, some magic that reveals itself slowly, in súbtle ways, as Lanegan broods over the trouble he's caused and looks for some small salvation.

It's a role Lanegan is used to playing. As frontman for the Trees, he has spent half of his adult life building one of Seattle's most explosive rock bands and the other half tearing it apart with booze and drugs. Unlike Scott Weiland or Dave Navarro, though, Lanegan doesn't wear the junkie-rock-star crown proudly. What's most remarkable about Scraps is its utter lack of romance: Lanegan faces his trail of terrors without apologies or self-pity, but with a kind of bruised dignity. As he sings in the album's most memorable line, from "Stay," "Living's not hard/It's just not easy."

Elsewhere, Lanegan looks for redemption wherever he can find it – in the hazy memory of lost lovers, in prayers and in hallucinatory death visions. The album's songs, fueled mostly by acoustic and electric guitars, brushed drums and the occasional sax and harmonica, bog down at times, and Lanegan's smoky baritone can seem distracted. But at best, in the slow-burning rockers "Hotel," "Stay" and "Wheels," the music's moody soulfulness is breathtaking.

It's long been Lanegan's dream to write songs as good as those of his own troubled hero, the late Townes Van Zandt. Scraps at Midnight never quite reaches that goal. But the album proves it'd be worth Lanegan's while to stick around and keep trying. (RS 792)

JASON FINE