Album Review - Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan - Ballad of the Broken Seas
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.
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