You could maybe think of stranger musical partnerships, if you tried really very hard and weren’t distracted. That weird ginger one from Girls Aloud and that chap with the inverted crucifix branded on his forehead from silly satanic rockers Deicide. There’s one, just. But this, with a serious face on, is proper beauty and the beast stuff. Nick Cave & Kylie odd at least. But like that particular example of odd, this one dispels its differences to find a tastefully polarised common ground. On one side of the split screen we have this delicate, unsoiled chanteuse, former morning songbird with just about the least weathered band in all of existence, Belle & Sebastian. And then we have a grisly Neanderthal who’s been dragged backwards through hell’s coarse shrubbery a good couple of times and most recently been hired by Queens Of The Stone Age to make them seem more menacing. Bet they didn’t bump into each other down at the local residents’ meeting.
But then, as a duet, this situation isn’t as outrageous as it might have initially seemed. Mark Lanegan has already put in the hours with dusty-porch Americana, on his excellent stripped-back album ‘Field Songs’. It’s not all tree-trunk riffery and gasoline on your cornflakes round his house, believe it or not. And such a sound forms the basis of this record, for the most part a husky ménage-a-tois between the two diametrically-opposing voices and a guitar/piano with subtle dressing where required. It’s folk music and it’s blues music. Occasionally it is dressed up with musky, elegant, intoxicated strings. Sometimes it is so lonely and pure. It is the sum of its parts, beautifully so.
Isobel Campbell’s voice is so translucent and wispy, the kind of thing you’re not sure whether it’s actually there, or a figment of your imagination. You’ll keep checking over your shoulder. She hops across and drapes herself over the delicately struck notes of ‘Saturday’s Gone’, ‘Black Mountain’ and ‘Dusty Wreath’ like a dew-kissed fairy. Mark Lanegan is comparatively the proverbial gentle giant, gruffly shuffling his way through ‘Deus Ibi Est’ with Buck 65’s rhythm and Captain Beefheart’s rasp. They play against each other with a perfectly placed sense of character, but also combine together to complement each other fabulously on the campfire infectiousness of the title track, Beefheart stomp of ‘Ramblin’ Man’ and the irresistible orchestral country of the album’s pop piece ‘Honey Child, What Can I Do’. It’s an odd sight, but take a look at their silhouette disappearing into the sunset, it works. Sweet/sour, ying/yang, Cave/Kylie, Campbell/Lanegan…
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