SCREAMING TREES make monumental rock from small-town tensions. They stole the show at Reading and their new album, according to THE STUD BROTHERS, is the first great American LP this decade. Here's how it all happened. Pics: TOM SHEEHAN

There are days when music is the most exciting thing in your life. Today is one of those days. Seattle-based band Screaming Trees are set to release their new album, Sweet Oblivion.

Perhaps the first thing to say about Sweet Oblivion is that it's one of those rare records that restores in the music-lover those naive passions a steady stream of piss-poor releases can so easily sap from them. Truth is, the best most albums can hope to do is chip away at our ever-developing cynicism. Sweet Oblivion blows it to smithereens.

This is an album so emotionally charged, so utterly electrifying that even as you leap for joy, you feel lumps rising in your throat. Friends of ours have already dubbed it "the first great American rock album of the decade" – and this is a decade that's already unleashed Nirvana's Nevermind, Pearl Jam's Ten and Neil Young's Arc Weld. It's that great.

Sweet Oblivion is Screaming Trees' seventh album. The group, three-quarters of which hail from the tiny, rural redneck town of Ellensburg, have been on the commercial periphery of the American hardcore scene for something approaching seven years. In that time, vocalist Mark Lanegan has worked with Kurt Cobain on an album titled The Winding Sheet (compulsory purchase); bassist Van Conner and his brother, guitarist Lee, have worked with fellow man-mountain Tad; the group have employed Mudhoney's Dan Peters as drummer and their present drummer, Barrett Martin, did his thing with Skinyard.

Sweet Oblivion was initially intended to be Screaming Trees' last will and testament. By the time they came to record it, they were sick of the sight of one another, sick of bullshit and all honestly believed it would be the last thing they ever did together.

"Basically," explains Lanegan, "we hated one another. We thought, 'This is it, the end, so we better make it good'. We'd always tried to make every album we did the best it could be but, whether it was the songwriting or the production or the fact that we couldn't stand each other, something always happened to make it all fall apart. This time the problems within the band seem to have worked for us, drawn us together more. I think we're more like a band than we ever have been before."

Lanegan describes the band's problems as financial, personal and often alcohol-related. He's reluctant to be more specific than that. From what we've been able to gather, though, it appears that Van was going through divorce, Barrett had broken up with his long-time girlfriend and Lanegan, after five years off the booze, got back into it in the big, brain-blistering way only a former heavy drinker can.

Lee's problem, according to Lanegan, was that he was the same way he always is. There exists real tension between the two of them. There was a point, Dan Peters tells us, when Lanegan and Lee spent more time deriding each other's ideas than they did writing songs. When we came to talk to the band, Barrett was eager to explain that this was the first time all four had sat down together to be interviewed. And, after Lee had said his piece, Lanegan pointed out that it would most certainly be the last.

Screaming Trees have a reputation for not just being difficult but dangerously intense. This is partly because of what they sound like (incendiary Crazy Horse guitar meets Leonard Cohen in a motorway pile-up) and partly what they look like. Van and Lee could easily be mistaken for gum-chewing, gun-toting pick-up truck drivers and Barrett could be Dennis Hopper's sidekick in Easy Rider.

But mostly though it's because of what Lanegan looks and sounds like. In interviews (when he talks at all) he talks in an amused, world-weary drawl somewhere between the patronising and the threatening. On record he bridges the gap between the cerebral and the visceral. At times (particularly when he's to be heard over an acoustic twang) he sounds full of considered loss and longing. Elsewhere, when a firestorm of guitars drag his voice to a scream, he sounds bloodied, deranged but always, somehow, monumentally dignified. Looks wise Lanegan seems to have stepped out from a yellowing Victorian picture of gunfighters. He looks like a force of nature.

And then there's the mythology that surrounds him. Word is, at school he was one of the bad kids, a football player who cut classes to steal barrels of beer and organise "keg parties" in the woods, eventually dragging Van, a fellow punk enthusiast, down to his own level. In the Trees his problem with alcohol was made doubly dangerous by his liking for hunting rifles and violence.

Of course Lanegan denies all this.

"There's not much you can do about your own reputation," he says. "As the great American philosopher Popeye once said, 'I yam what I yam'. Really, I don't think it's any of my f***ing business what other people think of me, that's their business. But I do think any trouble I've been in is just a question of bad timing, just like it is with everyone else. I think I generally have the best of intentions, don't you?"

Pressed further, Lanegan digs in his heels.

"I won't be a party to my own funeral here."

Whatever the truth about Lanegan and the band, the idea of Screaming Trees as white trash country punk rockers is something that in the coming months will be compounded, even overblown, by the group's cool, impenetrable attitude. And why not, it's a marvellous idea. Sweet Oblivion suits its makers' reputations, ploughing deep, bloody furrows into the underbelly of rural America. In its vast emotive sweet it manages to conjure images of wheat fields, mountain ranges and timberyards. Its subjects are small-town loves, outback alienation, disaffection, drunkenness and impulsive vendettas, all rendered savagely, romantically real and, perhaps more importantly, poignant by a sound as much inspired by The Byrds and Gram Parsons as it is by Black Flag and Black Sabbath. "Troubled Times", for instance, begins on a maudlin note, Lanegan singing, "I know my word ain't the best" (later "I know my love ain't the best", later still "I know my luck ain't the best"), before it tears into a furious, fuzzed-up strum founded on intricate, indelible melodies. On "Julie Paradise", a soft hypnotic riff builds to a guitar apocalypse as Lanegan tells the take of a family destroyed – "I saw your mother cry/Sent a bullet home to the family/I saw your father die/Died a broken, lonely man" – delivering the lines with an indescribable mixture of compassion and twisted relish.

Sweet Oblivion often has us thinking of country music. Not of course in the sense of bootlace ties and rhinestone-studded cowboy boots but because it's near-cinematically evocative of a place we all know about – middle America and, beyond that, home, your home, anyone's home, with all its unbearably concentrated and implosive passions.

Lee considers the idea of Screaming Trees being a country band.

"We're not a country band and our music's not remotely country," he says. "But I do think sometimes there's a feel that's country. It's weird you ask that question because I've never said anything about this before but I've always felt it a little bit."

Barrett pitches in, eyes bulging indignantly.

"I'd like to say a little something about country music. We saw this sonofabitch play at the Sony Convention. I'm not gonna mention any names but it was the most un-country bullshit I have ever seen. It was middle-American, album-oriented shit. The kind of country I like is the stuff these guys turned me onto; older, original Country like early Johnny Cash, George Jones and Patsy Cline. The shit they pass off as country nowadays is pathetic."

Lanegan ruefully shakes his head.

"We are not a country band. What you've gotta understand is that we all come from a small town and when you're there you don't know what you're supposed to be listening to, you don't know what hip is. So you listen to everything, everything you can get your hands on. And all those influences are gonna come to bear on the music we make. We're just the sum of our own influences."

Screaming Trees are so much more than that. Last week, in the review of Reading Festival, they were tipped to be surprise headliners for next year. And, given Sweet Oblivion, they certainly ought to be. Of course it would suit Mark Lanegan's profoundly pessimistic disposition were they to flop but we honestly can't see that happening. Some things, some music is just too great to go unnoticed.

Like we say, today is one of those days.

Sweet Oblivion is released on Epic on September 21st.

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