Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan
Issue #27
Ballad of the Broken Seas (V2)
By John Everhart
Published: March 1st, 2006 | 12:00am
Mining the spirit of dustbowl-era Grapes of Wrath mythologized Americana, Isobel Campbell’s newest finds her sounding bleak and dislocated, a marked departure from her auspiciously sunny solo debut, Amorino. The gravel-voiced curmudgeon Mark Landegan, who’s written his fair share of songs chronicling desolation, lends her a hand and together, they do a fine job of crafting an album of Johnny Cash-worthy ballads of love and hate.
Stark opener “Deus Ibi Est” smolders with marching-band percussion and a hypnotic guitar line framing Lanegan’s sepulchral growl that “Demons I shall tame you / Down the barrel of my gun,” as Campbell’s soft background coo provides a mellifluous temper. “The False Husband” is a distant cousin of Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra’s “Some Velvet Morning,” approximating its schizophrenic anomie with dizzying sonic shifts from dark to light, punctuated by Lanegan and Campbell’s jaded swapping of perspectives
Other highlights include the singsong “(Do You Wanna) Come Walk With Me?” and the cinematic Ennio Morricone gallop of “Honey Child What Can I Do?,” but the record saves its best for last on closer “The Circus Is Leaving Town.” A mournful chamber ballad penned by Campbell, it finds Lanegan lugubriously crooning over supple slide guitar and a Hammond organ that brings to mind Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. It, with the rest of this excellent album, proves what Belle & Sebastian rendered the nearly unthinkable: that this former twee-pop chanteuse has an inner Heart of Darkness.
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