The four members of Screaming Trees don't do interviews together. It's a little odd, if only because the Seattle-based group has accomplished a lot together over the past decade - writing, recording and touring behind eight full-length albums and a couple of stray EPs.

Of those releases, the best known is 1992's commercial breakthrough Sweet Oblivion, which added "soulful" to the list of adjectives that one could safely apply to grunge. But the Trees' latest, Dust (Epic), is the most fully realized work of their career, branching out from Oblivion's buzz-and-drone riff-rock to incorporate electric guitars, Harmonium, tablas, Mellotron, and layers of acoustic and electric guitars. At its core, Dust fuses the elemental roar of overdriven guitars to the psychedelic swirl of '60s garage rock, the anthemic crunch of '70s hard rock, and the rugged individualism of the American post-punk scene from which the Trees emerged.

That's just some of what singer Mark Lanegan, guitarist Gary Lee Conner (known to his bandmates simply as Lee), bassist (and brother of Lee) Van Conner, and drummer Barrett Martin are capable of accomplishing together. But a group interview? Out of the question.

"In the old days," explains Van, "when we used to try and do interviews as a whole band, people would get angry with each other, interrupt each other, and somebody would always end up walking out and telling somebody else to fuck off." Lee is even more to the point: "If we were a married couple, we would have gotten divorced a long time ago."

The Trees are obviously a partnership made up of four distinct musical personalities. Each member has pursued various projects outside the band, including Lanegan's two solo albums on Sub Pop - 1990's The Winding Sheet and 1994's gorgeously start Whiskey For The Holy Ghost - Van's side project Solomon Grundy, and Lee's band Purple Outside. Martin is a member of the Seattle supergroup Mad Season, which features Alice In Chains singer Layne Staley and Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready. Yet in the end, despite the feuds and side projects, the Screaming Trees remains central, and the circumstances surrounding the making of Dust prove it.

In 1992, hoping to capitalize on the success of Sweet Oblivion, the Trees set out to release a quick follow-up. What they got instead was a three-year delay during which the band wrote and recorded two complete albums. By unanimous agreement the first, for which they'd returned to Oblivion producer Don Fleming, was scrapped, or as the group is apt to put it, "aborted". It was the kind of difficult, expensive, and emotionally taxing decision that has caused lesser bands to call it quits. But the Trees wrote more material, cut new demos, and hooked up with producer George Drakoulias (Black Crowes, Jayhawks). The result is an album that achieves new heights of beauty for the Trees and settles into deep, cavernous grooves.

"It was nice to have access to George Drakoulias' full warehouse of guitars," says Van. "He brought in this huge stack of Polaroids of guitars and amps, and we could pick out whatever we wanted to use. It was like being in a funhouse of equipment. We used this true stereo double-speaker amp to do the stereo tremolo at the beginning of 'Look At You' and George brought in this really cool double-neck Danelectro Longhorn that had a bass and a guitar on it. We used that on 'Halo Of Ashes'. I think we loaded up all 48 tracks on a couple of tunes.

The Trees also wanted to use a Mellotron, so Drakoulias rented two of them and asked Tom Petty's keyboard ace Benmont Tench to come in on the sessions. "Benmont is a stump-the-band kind of guy," Van recalls. "He can play any song you can think of on guitar or keyboards. He set up with a Mellotron on either side of him and an Orchestron in the middle, and all we'd have to do is tell him what key the song started in. Within two takes he'd have it down."

Along with Tench's keys, which embellish eight of Dust's ten tracks, there's a gutsy cameo guitar solo by Mike McCready on 'Dying Days'. Then there are piles of acoustic and electric guitars, from wicked wah-wah flourishes and growling, overdriven leads to chorused arpeggios and watery washes of tremolo. But Andy Wallace's fine-tuned mix skilfully blends the guitar and keyboards, highlighting the density of the arrangements without burying any of the discs hooks and melodies. It wasn't the first time the Trees had attempted layering of this sort. But it's the first time it worked.

Barrett Martin is the newest member; he joined back in 1991, just a few months prior to the Sweet Oblivion sessions.

Surrounded by an impressive collection of exotic, mostly acoustic instruments, including a bass marimba, several Baliphones, Burmese temple gongs, Tibetan vibrating bowls, and two sitars, Martin admits that he was "totally amazed to be playing with the Trees".

"They had decided that Sweet Oblivion was probably going to be their last record, so they wanted to make the best record that they could. I rehearsed with them for a few months, we recorded, and then immediately we went on tour. It was like the band was being reborn. I'd met Van before and I knew that I had the same ideas about music that he did, so I had a feeling I would fit in. It just felt unified, like a band on a mission."

Martin's fascination with Eastern, Arabic and Indian music is clearly reflected on Dust, particularly on 'Gospel Plow' and 'Halo Of Ashes', where he plays Harmonium and tablas. But it's his positive energy and unbridled enthusiasm for making music that's had the biggest impact. As Mark Lanegan points out, "Barrett has made all the difference. He's positive, and Mark Pickerel, out original drummer, was really negative. I truly love Mark as a person, but when you have three other guys who are negative in their own different ways, having a fourth negative personality is just too much. I mean, you've got the brother dynamic, which is never easy, and they you got me. I'm not so easy to live with either."

"We were using all kinds of wacky instrumentation on our early records, but it always sounded like shit," offers a rather sullen Mark Lanegan between sips of root beer at a brew pub located a couple of blocks from his downtown Seattle apartment. It's been rainy and gray for the last three weeks, and that's been affecting his mood. But even without the weather, it's been a tough couple of years for Lanegan. Kurt Cobain was a close friend; he gave Lanegan an as yet unrecorded song, a black and white Strat, and sang backups on The Winding Sheets. Lanegan was also pals with the late Jeffrey Lee Pierce, longtime leader of the Gun Club; they'd been collaborating on some songs before Pierce died earlier this year.

"The crazy thing is that Jeffrey wanted me to be the singer," remembers Lanegan. "And he was one of my favourite singers."

Obviously, the feeling was mutual, and rightly so. For all of Dust's experimentalism, the band's most distinctive feature is still Lanegan's gutsy baritone wail. The deep, growling conviction of his nicotine-stained, whisky-scarred voice has always set the Trees apart, first from the band's labelmates on the California punk label SST in the late '80s, and then from the flood of grunge bands that flowed out of the Northwest a few years ago. Lanegan seems to summon the powers of heaven and hell with the sound of his voice, conveying much more than the sum of the words he sings. As Lee Conner puts it, "He knows how to put that extra little spark into a song and take it over the top."

As far as Lanegan is concerned, the "aborted" album was symptomatic of the band backsliding. We were tired and hating life and it showed."

His songs do tend toward the foreboding, and melancholy end of the emotional spectrum. For Lanegan, though, it's just part of being true to his muse. "It would seem weird to make something that's happy-sounding," he says. "But the truth is, usually we're pretty happy when we're making a record."

As if to emphasize his point, the sun suddenly breaks through the clouds and nearly blinds him. "God damn, that's nice," he enthuses. "It just takes a second like that to really feel better." And then, by some eerie coincidence, Kurt Cobain's very Lanegan-style unplugged reading of the Vaselines tune 'Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam" wells up from the jukebox as Lanegan pushes his reddish blond hair off his face and basks in a few stray rays of light.

Though Lanegan is responsible for the lyrics, most of the band's material originates with Gary Lee Conner. Onstage, Lee is the wildman of the band, pounding his guitar, rolling around on his back, and literally throwing his considerable weight around. As he puts is, "The live thing has always been different - it's just about getting up there and thrashing through the songs."

Playing bigger venues has given Lee more room to move, but it's also made it harder for the Trees to approximate the dense roar of their recorded material. So this summer, for the first time, the band is bringing in a ringer, former Kyuss guitarist Josh Homme, to fill out the sound.

Even without Homme, the band is a big, guitar-powered steamroller in front of 1000 fans at a Boston club. Before long, all 300 pounds of Lee are bouncing around the stage, his right arm swinging into some fierce Pete Townshend-style windmills, and his foot pumping hard on the wah-wah pedal. Barrett bears down on the muscular backbeat of 'Shadow of the Season', pausing on the bridge to pound on some medium-size hand drums to the left of his kit, while Van rides the low E on his Fender Precision. And Lanegan stands rooted at center stage, his hands gripping the microphone stand as if it were the only thing keeping him from being whisked away by the tornado of power chords.

"This is the 'we decided not to murder each other' tour, " Van kids before the band kicks into a furious version of 'Bed Of Roses' from 1990's Uncle Anesthesia. It's a good thing homicide's been ruled out. After all the interviews, photo shoots, side projects, and solo albums, this is what the four members of the Trees do best.

- Shadow of the Gibson - Yes, Gary Lee Conner does own an Electro-Harmonix Screaming Tree, the trebly overdrive pedal from which the band got its name. "It reminds me of the gnarly, high-endy sound on the lead for 'Taxman'," he says. But on Dust, Lee opted for a Jim Dunlop Fuzzface. Live, he prefers a ProCo Rat distortion pedal and either on old Thomas Organ Crybaby wah-wah or a DeArmond wah pedal. His two workhorse guitars are a '63 Gibson SG and a '72 Les Paul Custom. Amps are a different story. "For amps I'm totally in flux. I was using Mega/Boogie Rectifiers but on the album I used a whole bunch of different amps, including what I think I'm going to use on tour: a new reissue Orange that Gibson is distributing called the Overdrive 120."

Lee's brother Van Conner calls himself a "traditional Fender with Ampeg guy." He played his FenderJazz bass with Bartolini active single-coil pickups and his early '70s P-Bass though a '69 Ampeg SVT and an older 8x10" cabinet on Dust; he also used a smaller flip-top Ampeg B15. On tour he's taking an Ampeg B4B head and running it through two 15s, and running a '69 SVT head through a cabinet with eight 10" speakers. "I also might have the SVT power one of two 18s for Barrett's monitor."

Barrett Martin admits that he's pushing for the two 18s because he "can't stand waiting for the bass signal to come through the monitors. I've gotta be feeling Van's vibe." His main set is a big Tama ArtStar, his cymbals are hand-hammered Sabians, and his sticks are "big Pro-Mark Lincoln Logs." Martin still has what he and the band refer to as the "Battleship", an old Tama RockStar set covered in brushed aluminium. "It's the same as the SwingStar except the year I bought it they changed the name to RockStar. I used it on all the Skin Yard U.S. tours and then on the Sweet Oblivion tours. It's all beat up but when we used it in the studio, it just kept sounding better and better."

Though he's the first to admit that he's "not a technical guy at all," Mark Lanegan knows that he usually sings through a Shure SM58 microphone. He also owns a black and white Fender Strat that Kurt Cobain gave him and a Gibson J-200 that he uses to write songs. "At home I usually just run my guitar right into my Tascam four-track or headphones," he says, "but I have a big vintage Orange combo amp for when I need to be loud."

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