Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 16/10/06
Label: V2

That Isobel Campbell would be laughed out of the parish if she ever tried out for the church choir goes without saying. Yet for some reason, rather than becoming everyone's hip session cellist of choice, the gamine indie pin-up has, like the vocally-challenged likes of Jane Birkin before her, sought out as many opportunities to sing as possible. At one point here she even does it unaccompanied ("Loving Hannah") - you gotta respect that.

But to the bookish fans who have admired her Jean Seberg-esque charms since she first joined then-boyfriend Stuart Murdoch's fledgling Belle & Sebastian, this is precisely the point: her voice, reedy-thin and shy, is the epitome of innocent girlishness. Chicks just don't sing like that any more. And for the kind of person who rues the fact that chicks don't act innocent and girlish any more, either, she offers a novel thrill. (Never mind that off-duty she might be a coke-snorting, motorbike-riding yobbo).

The multi-tracking deployed to give her tones some backbone backfires, perhaps deliberately - rather than sounding like an Isobel Campbell who might be able, at a push, to sing the "Flower Of Scotland" at the next Scottish football international, it just sounds like a row of Isobel Campbells standing shoulders hunched and avoiding eye contact, a safe yard apart from each other.

Of the 13 tracks here, Campbell has penned roughly half. The remainder is made up of traditional folk songs (much a-roaming and a-weeping and a-marrying), a cover of "The Wicker Man"'s "Willow's Song" and one title-supplying instrumental by Glaswegian guitar legend Jim McCulloch. They all fuse together in a mystical, cello-and-xylophone sprinkled three-quarters of an hour that might have been recorded around a wood-burning stove at the very dawn of the gramophone era.

Perhaps due to the timeless status of much of the material, "Milk White Sheets" is far more substantial than earlier Gentle Waves outings, as well as previous solo effort "Amorino". "O Love Is Teasing" is especially haunting; "Hori Horo" and "Are You Going To Leave Me?" have a gorgeous touch of the "Scarborough Fair"-era Simon & Garfunkels about them; and the rousing, rhythmic instrumental "Over The Wheat And The Barley" offers sighing strings over pagan drums building to a climax begging for a naked Britt Ekland to make out with a wall to.

Naturally, however, it doesn't have - nor even try to have - the impact of her other album this year, the Mercury-nominated "Ballad Of The Broken Seas", in which she played Kylie to Mark Lanegan's Nick Cave. This is an album rich in feminine delicacy and woodsy magic, but ultimately Campbell will remain far too fey for many.

    by Anna Britten