Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 30/01/06
Label: V2

Sweet-voiced former Belle & Sebastian singer, Isobel Campbell, has released solo projects before but never quite like this one. This most improbable pairing with dead-eyed bluesman, one-time Screaming Trees leader and occasional Queens Of The Stone Age monolith, Mark Lanegan, was apparently conceived upon the pair's first meeting in Glasgow.

Frankly, it's hard enough to imagine them meeting at all, let alone professing mutual appreciation and a burning desire to play Lee and Nancy over a transatlantic link-up. But here's the proof, 12 tracks that saunter from sweetly creepy lullabies to scorched blues. The obvious 'beauty and the beast' disjuncture gives the songs a cold, detached air, as if Lanegan and Campbell are never signing to each other but rather they're two people signing the same song simultaneously. In fact, it's less Lee and Nancy and more Tricky and Martina.

Much of this may be down to the fact that most of the songs were composed and played by Campbell in Glasgow, then sent to LA for Lanegan to dub in his trademark growl. It's a thoroughly 21st Century proposition: Scottish indie chanteuse draws on the American songbook to pen shoot-out country-folk and emails them to her gravel-voiced outlaw to do his worst. There's a sense that she's typecasting Lanegan at times, though in truth, he's equally prone to typecast himself.

"(Do You Wanna) Come Walk With Me" plays like the theme to a John Ford Western re-imagined in psychedelic colours, "Revolver" is brilliant broken-man blues that could have been lifted directly from Lanegan's last album and "The Circus Is Leaving Town" borrows both its title and languid rhythm from Dylan's "Desolation Row". Still, there is too little here to qualify the record as considerably more than a series of fascinating doodles, a fact reinforced by the instrumental filler that crops up here and there. "False Husband" hints at greater possibilities, Campbell dropping the pastiche of Americana for a beautiful string-laden folk chorus that punctuates the Spaghetti Western of Lanegan's croaked vocal and steely guitar lead.

So while this isn't "The Desert Sessions" - sadly, Isobel Campbell is no Polly Harvey - "Ballad Of The Broken Seas" remains an engaging curio whilst we wait to see what both artists do next.

    by James Poletti