It's no joke, but a chiaroscuro contrast with the song's pitch subject. Lanegan sings "All Misery / Flowers" like a Tom Waits song, his vocal delivery tripping against the song's rhythms as he conjures junkie afflictions: "Little girls might twitch at the way I itch, but the way I burn, it's a son of a bitch." Dulli closes the album with "Front Street", which begins, somewhat morbidly, with the chirping of birds.
Together, they can make a line like "We're gonna have some fun" sound utterly sinister, which lends these lecherously slow burners their peculiar gravity. With a billion cigarettes between them, the Twins are well matched vocally: Lanegan sings like he's rising from the dead, Dulli like he's falling from grace. "Who Will Lead Us?" is part folk and part gospel, so subdued that the tension never releases but bubbles into "Seven Stories Underground". "God's Children" settles into a Whigsy blaxpoitation mood before drummer Greg Wieczorek hammers out a soaring chorus. Before the Twins can build to the expected finale, the song simply fades out, redemption thwarted. Discordant strings add tension to opener "The Stations", which marches along at a midtempo before Schneeberger's churchly organ raises it aloft. Scavenging the gutter, though, Dulli and Lanegan come across some new flourishes. With its odd chorale intro and a string arrangement that shifts chords tectonically, "Idle Hands" builds to a chorus that could scale a skyscraper. "Each to Each" revisits the eerie electronica of the Twilight Singers' debut, a welcome compliment to Dulli's vocals courtesy of guitarist Jeff Klein and synth player Natasha Schneider. The project's sense of familiarity, however, is not a negative. Musically, Saturnalia, named after the Roman festival where slaves and masters switch roles, is a concentrated dose of their usual badassery, never straying too far from the territory Dulli explored on the last three Singers albums, and even includes many of the same collaborators: wayward troubadour Joseph Arthur, Mathias Schneeberger, Dave Rosser, Martina Topley-Bird, Queen of the Stone Age Troy Van Leeuwen, and New Orleans organist Quintron (who illuminates "Seven Stories Underground"). Dulli and Lanegan have spent most of the 2000s collaborating flirtatiously, touring and recording together- check out Lanegan's vocals on the Twilight Singers' cover of "Flashback" by Fat Freddy's Drop, from their 2006 EP A Stitch in Time- but Saturnalia is their long-in-the-works debut as the Gutter Twins, a partnership that Dulli describes as "the Satanic Everly Brothers." The "Satanic Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" might be a little more apt: The album finds them bursting forth from their studio, guns blazing but no clean getaway in sight.