Isobel Campbell

What happens when a female cellist/vocalist from a Scottish twee-pop band makes an album with a '90s grunge-rock vet? That's the question answered by Isobel Campbell (Belle & Sebastian) and Mark Lanegan (Screaming Trees) on Ballad of the Broken Seas. This is not an album by a rocker who thought he needed some female backing vocals. On the contrary, this is a project initiated and produced by Isobel Campbell. But it's not a cute role-reversal with Lanegan as a featured vocalist on her album either. This is a collaborative effort with the vocals equally shared throughout the album's twelve tracks.

The sound created by this seemingly odd couple pairing can best be compared to the '70s output of Leonard Cohen. This is due in part to Lanegan's gravely world-weary vocals, but equally responsible is the lush orchestration that effortlessly carries each track. It's a confident, no-gimmick release by two indie-minded, multi-talented singer/songwriters. Even though this is a pairing of two stylized vocalists (Isobel has the sweet voice of a '60s folky-pop star and Mark's voice is the intersection of Tom Waits and Neil Diamond), the two only have one actual duet - "Honey Child What Can I Do?" They buried it as track ten for the fully engaged listener. It beautifully and seamlessly follows the other payoff track on the album, the gentle, begging-to-be-on-a-film-score instrumental, "It's Hard to Kill a Bad Thing."

This is not a 21st century iTunes-type release. The album's anachronistic sound unfortunately won't find the scores of fickle ADHD digital music consumers buying up the album's one or two standout tracks. It's a slow burn and a wonderfully cohesive album, perfect for those who still listen to complete albums on long drives at night... and set them to repeat. - Doug Kamin

It's tempting to say something facile like "beauty meets the beast" in writing about this collaboration between former Belle & Sebastian member Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan, best known for his work with Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age. After all, Campbell's voice is all sweet angelic whisper while Lanegan's whisky-and-nicotine rasp sounds like the product of ten thousand nights in a barroom, but somehow these sweet and sour elements come together with striking and impressive results on Ballad of the Broken Seas. It helps that musically these two are not far away from the same page; the ghostly blues-based structures of Lanegan's Whiskey for the Holy Ghost and The Winding Sheet may be starker than Campbell's stuff with Belle & Sebastian or her solo set Amorino, but they both appear to revel in the sort of glorious sadness that draws beauty from melancholy, and they find a dark and lovely common ground on this set of songs. Campbell produced the album and wrote the bulk of the material (though Lanegan wrote one song, the moody and satisfying "Revolver"), and while it's no great surprise that she comes up with superb material for herself, she also knows what to make of Lanegan's expressive rasp ("The Circus Is Leaving Town" is as good a performance as he's ever recorded), and their numbers together (especially "The False Husband" and the cover of Hank Williams' "Ramblin' Man") recall what one hoped Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue's duets on Murder Ballads would sound like. Ballad of the Broken Seas is a superbly crafted bit of late-night introspection that brings out the best in both Lanegan and Campbell and adds new and unexpected facets to their impressive repertoires. ~ Mark Deming, All Music Guide