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Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan
Ballad of the Broken Seas
(V2)
First Appeared in The Music Box, May 2006, Volume 13, #5
Written by John Metzger
The pairing of former Belle & Sebastian singer Isobel Campbell with Screaming
Trees front man Mark Lanegan is, at first glance, so improbably odd that it
ought not to work. In fact, one expects that either Campbell will slather Lanegan’s musings in so much regal, chamber pop-infused innocence that it will
undermine the gloom in which he seems to enjoy wallowing or, far more likely,
that Lanegan’s dour, unsettling nature will extinguish, at any moment,
Campbell’s delicately flickering flame. Nevertheless — aside from the absolutely
lovely, but utterly ill-placed instrumental It’s Hard to Kill a Bad Thing
— neither party succumbs to the other on their first collaborative affair
Ballad of the Broken Seas. Instead, the duo intertwines their differing
approaches in such a playful fashion that they succeed surprisingly well at
striking a perfect balance between their diametrically opposed personalities.
On the one hand, Campbell’s optimistic vocals lend a ghostly white shimmer to
Ballad of the Broken Seas’ material; on the other hand, Lanegan’s boozy
edginess drips with danger; and further enhancing the distance that divides them
is the manner in which the album was recorded. Rather than uniting in a studio,
Campbell and Lanegan utilized the internet to stitch together their individual
contributions. Such impersonal interaction certainly would have derailed most
outings, but here, it serves both to augment the duo’s emotional estrangement
from one another as well as to add a disquieting aura to their sexual taunts.
It’s precisely upon this dramatic tension that all of the arrangements on
Ballad of the Broken Seas hang. The swells of piano and strings, the strum
of acoustic guitar, and the gentle brush of percussion that accompany Campbell
provide hope that frequently softens her mourning, while with Lanegan, the
instrumentation appropriately turns jaggedly surly, leaving in its grungy wake a
sense of dusky desolation. Not surprisingly, then, it’s when Campbell and
Lanegan sing in tandem, as they do on the album’s highlight The False Husband,
that their union is most effective. Together, they turn sorrow into beauty and
break the genre-specific molds to which each typically has been assigned.  ½
Ballad of the Broken Seas is
available from Amazon.com.
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Ratings
1 Star: Pitiful
2 Stars: Listenable
3 Stars: Respectable
4 Stars: Excellent
5 Stars: Can't Live Without It!!
Copyright © 2006 The Music Box
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