The year was 1999, and it looked like the writing was on the wall for Screaming Trees.
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Formed 14 years earlier, the Trees were born in Ellensburgh, a ranching town in Washington State some 100 miles from Seattle.
Notionally, they were a punk-rock group - as was any band that put out an album on the Black Flag frontman Greg Ginn's SST Records, as the Trees did three times in the late 1980s. But really, Screaming Trees' music came from somewhere else. Theirs was a lumbering, hard-rock sound with a psychedelic, mystical edge - steeped in Led Zeppelin and Cream, but, more than anything else, reflecting the nature of their surroundings: drugs, blue-collar poverty and the dense forests and craggy mountains of the American north-west.
Screaming Trees, who days ago released the last recordings before their split 11 years ago in the form of Last Words: The Final Sessions, were ahead of their time. Their music predated the wave of grunge bands that emerged from the Seattle region in the early 1990s, and when that wave appeared, they rode it: spurred by MTV hits such as Nearly Lost You - a notable addition to the soundtrack from the film Singles - their 1992 album Sweet Oblivion sold 300,000 copies in the US. But Screaming Trees never quite made the leap to being superstars. Their George Drakoulias-produced 1996 album Dust included 10 grandly orchestrated, quasi-religious songs of deliverance set to the vocalist Mark Lanegan's sublime, world-weary baritone. It won glowing reviews but sales were modest, and by the time the Trees came off tour a couple of years later, they had no record label and no industry interest.
"There were no smart rock people at any of the major labels by 1999," says the Trees' drummer Barrett Martin. "It was all going the way of the boy bands."
Screaming Trees might not have had options, but they did have songs. So, between the winter of 1998 and the summer of 1999, the band dropped into three studios - Stone Gossard's Studio Litho and Jupiter Studios in Seattle, and a stint at Ocean Way in Los Angeles - to commit those songs to tape. "We recorded for posterity's sake, and I don't think we thought beyond that," says Martin. "The Trees never really had any grand strategy."
The previous decade or so had been a difficult one for Screaming Trees. A decade spent in each other's pockets had taken a toll on inter-band relations, and Lanegan's drug habit, a problem since his teens, made him a volatile character. Around the time of Dust, the guitarist Van Connor told the UK rock magazine Kerrang! that "this band is like being in a dysfunctional family - you're used to the abuse so you keep on taking it".
Yet, says Martin, for Screaming Trees' final sessions, none of this entered the frame. "Everyone was clean and sober, and it was the summer and fall in Seattle, the most beautiful time of the year."
Friends Peter Buck of REM and the Trees' touring guitarist Josh Homme, then readying his own band Queens of the Stone Age, came by the studio to offer guest parts, and everything was harmonious.
"There was a lot of laughing between the takes, and you can hear it on the multi-tracks. Lanegan was in rare form," adds Martin.
Following a final gig at the opening of Seattle's Experience Music Project in 2000, the band announced their split. The final sessions, recorded to two-inch tape, were sealed and left to gather dust in Gossard's studio basement. And that, for Screaming Trees, was that.
Until now. Last year, Martin and the Seattle producer Jack Endino cracked open the tapes to discover they were still intact. With the band's consent, the pair cleaned and restored the recordings, and the result is the Screaming Trees album that never was.
Songs such as Ash Grey Sunday and Crawlspace are a reminder of what a great band the Trees were at their peak, lean and urgent, shorn of the mellotron, sitar and harmonium that were a hallmark of Dust.
"I like that production, but I wanted to produce the band to sound the way we really sounded - live, spontaneous, explosive," says Martin. "These are elementally great songs, and too much overproduction would have ruined them. The Trees don't need an orchestra to sound like the Screaming Trees."
Following the Trees' split, all have remained in music. Lanegan joined Josh Homme in Queens of the Stone Age, and has pursued a busy solo career, as well as recording with Isobel Campbell and with Greg Dulli in The Gutter Twins. The guitarist Gary Lee Connor and his brother Van play in their own bands, Microdot Gnome and Valis. Martin has toured with REM and Stone Temple Pilots, and currently fronts his own world-jazz outfit.
As for Screaming Trees, well, who's to say?
"I'm not trying to be cryptic about it, but I truly don't know," says Martin. "We're all on good terms, we're friends - family, in a strange way. That's mostly due to getting older, having families, gaining a little bit of hard-earned wisdom after all those years. The important thing is that we made some albums that have stood the test of time. I think Last Words stands up there with Sweet Oblivion and Dust. More importantly, we all survived as people. No small feat in itself."
Sri Lanka squad for tri-nation series
Angelo Mathews (c), Upul Tharanga, Danushka Gunathilaka, Kusal Mendis, Dinesh Chandimal, Kusal Janith Perera, Thisara Perera, Asela Gunaratne, Niroshan Dickwella, Suranga Lakmal, Nuwan Pradeep, Dushmantha Chameera, Shehan Madushanka, Akila Dananjaya, Lakshan Sandakan and Wanidu Hasaranga
Key facilities
- Olympic-size swimming pool with a split bulkhead for multi-use configurations, including water polo and 50m/25m training lanes
- Premier League-standard football pitch
- 400m Olympic running track
- NBA-spec basketball court with auditorium
- 600-seat auditorium
- Spaces for historical and cultural exploration
- An elevated football field that doubles as a helipad
- Specialist robotics and science laboratories
- AR and VR-enabled learning centres
- Disruption Lab and Research Centre for developing entrepreneurial skills
MATCH INFO
South Africa 66 (Tries: De Allende, Nkosi, Reinach (3), Gelant, Steyn, Brits, Willemse; Cons: Jantjies 8)
Canada 7 (Tries: Heaton; Cons: Nelson)
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Document everything immediately; including dates, times, locations and witnesses
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How to protect yourself when air quality drops
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Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
Teams
Pakistan: Sarfraz Ahmed (captain), Mohammad Hafeez, Sahibzada Farhan, Babar Azam, Shoaib Malik, Asif Ali, Shadab Khan, Shaheen Shah Afridi, Usman Khan Shanwari, Hasan Ali, Imad Wasim, Faheem Ashraf.
New Zealand: Kane Williamson (captain), Corey Anderson, Mark Chapman, Lockie Ferguson, Colin de Grandhomme, Adam Milne, Colin Munro, Ajaz Patel, Glenn Phillips, Seth Rance, Tim Seifert, Ish Sodhi, Tim Southee, Ross Taylor.