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Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan - Sunday At Devil Dirt
One of the highlights of 2006 was definitely The Ballad of the Broken Sea’s, as I, like many others were shocked on how two artist from different sides of the spectrum managed to sound so well together. However, this could have been put down as a fluke by some, and it would have been a safer bet by the duo to leave it at that, but hey, they’ve shown some balls and given us a second helping.
Being quite new to the work of Mark Lanegan, it’s easy to compare him to the great Johnny Cash, with there gritty vocal style, and never more so on opening track Seafaring Song, which is elegant ballad of love found and lost, over the backdrop of Isobel whispering away, it really does feel like some lost civil war composition.
Like it’s predecessor, there’s no place for twee little pop tunes that we once likened Miss Campbell to on this album, as shown on The Raven, which is a million miles away from what Legal Man and Amarino were about, with the vocals resembling that of a rambling mad man in a Spaghetti Western, and Salvation being a bluesy number offering of one man’s excuses on how it all went wrong.
Who Built The Road has comparisons to Where The Wild Flowers Grow, with Isobel now showing that she has much more to offer than playing the cello and although her vocals never go higher than a whisper, somehow you feel that she just doesn’t need to bellow to get her point across. This point being true on Come On Over where the mixture of husky and raw meet feminine but persuasive and make perfect partners.
- Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan
- Sunday At Devil Dirt (2008|)
- Category: Album
- Label: V2
- Reviewed by: Keachy
- Published on: 06 May 2008
- Comments: 0
- Beat Surrender Rating:
Weblinks
Add to favouritesFortunately for us all Shotgun Blues isn’t a Guns & Roses cover, but just a another bluesy piece with Isobel taking the leading line and sounding rather sexy, but then Keep Me In Mind finds us changing directions and is a sweet folkie middle American ballad with straw hats, county fairs and Huckleberry Fin thrown in for good measure. The latter stages of the album reflects this new found optimism, with final track Sally Don’t Cry being the pick of the bunch.
So all in all a great, difficult second album, which I have to say has a fantastic feel about it and is produced and arranged well, especially the first half in which the strings sit well with the darker moments which is more my cup of tea. On conclusion, although I always found Campbell’s solo stuff enjoyable maybe she has now found her true niche in sharing the workload with someone that can bring something else to the table and I really hope that they’ll make it a trilogy in the near future.
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