More on: Isobel Campbell

Label: V2
Release Date: 12/05/08
Rating:

The silk on cracked leather pairing's second album follows on from where 'Ballad Of The Broken Seas' left off, Campbell penning 50s and 60s mid-West American blues ('Shotgun Blues'), country ('Keep Me In Mind, Sweetheart'), Broadway musical ('Come On Over, Turn Me On') and folk (every other song apart from 'Salvation' and 'Back Burner') with a reverence and timelessness which feels you with a mysteriously comforting sense that 'Sunday At Devil Dirt' could have come out any time in the last forty-five years.

With Lanegan's charcoal tones dominant, and Campbell either singing an octave above him like an echo rather than a competitive force, or using her voice as an accompanying instrument, the songs align themselves much more with, say, Dylan, Cash or Cohen than Cash and Carter or Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra, to whom they are often compared. Lanegan may be Campbell's muse, but not AN Other at any communicative level, let alone a lover she's at loggerheads with.

But lyrically there is none of the restraint, mystique, pride, folly and weakness of Dylan et al's personas at their best. Lanegan's own lay all their armour down without blushing or squirming. Now it would be easy at this point to take a cynical view of a statement such as "Belle and Sebastian fey Scottish maiden writes for Yank male ex-grunger across an ocean to sing American songs which evoke an era of lone-ranging cowboys that probably never existed". And, yes, these are simple, plate-full songs - with the notable exception of 'Who Built The Road', a delightfully subtle, psychologically post-modern battle song of the sexes – but they have a purity, honesty and accuracy to them, a sense that 'you had been there'. Lanegan's character in the bluesy 'Salvation' – the album's only song not written by Campbell, the author being Jim McCulloch – in fact makes a joke about his own earnestness: "gotta get up and moan". It is as if McCulloch is saying, well this album may not embody the age-old Yankee macho spirit of grace under pressure, but hell these songs are not about cock/gun fights/war but an altogether potentially more subtle, insidious enemy: love, that can turn even the most battle-hardened all-American heroes into morose, self-pitying saps.

The title lyric of the jaunty, spiky 'The Flame That Burns' summarises beautifully the album's straightforward theme: that love makes your world go round but without it stops it and, lost in a wasteland, you have to somehow find your way home, but home in these tracks is at best a faint hope that a redemptive love will come again ('Something To Believe'). The songs' bare soundscapes evoke these lovelorn worlds, often faintly calling to mind Morricone-soundtracked Westerns, invariably dust-bitten, barren worlds with slow paced action and long shots galore to highlight man isolated, pitted against nature rather than protected by it or provided for.

The album is not all about one solitary, sorry man stuck with Desert Mother Nature as a hopeless substitute lover, however. 'Shotgun Blues', for example, is Campbell's (only) solo vocal effort here, her voice seeming to drift from a seedy club stage, white, velvet and impenetrable through a wall of smoke. "Oooh daddy lay it on my bed" she mouths wantonly, coyly yet with complete self-control, as if seeking self-debasement of a kind Freud only fully reserved for kids, psychologically.

'Back Burner' turn us on to 70s sleaze with Lanegan's Tom Waits drinking in the liquid night-time of the soul delivery, its orgy suggestive lyrics, its threadbare hack-Bitches Brew synth work, and its raunchy bass, slide guitar and shakers camping up a picture of a coked up dog on heat. The song ends side A with a plinky plonk piano 'interval', cleverly nodding us towards the saloon of the wild west again, to a pre-70s Waits and, with an old car horn honk, to an era when automobiles first triumphed over horses, devoid of the 70s kind of yuppie excess, but every bit as lost.

Jon Parry

Isobel Campbell Official Site