It was a stark collaboration then, and it remains a stark collaboration now. Gravel-voiced hell-hound and leather-clad bastion of US alternative Mark Lanegan first dueted with fluttering angel of the Bell & Sebastian parish Isobel Campbell on 2006’s rock-solid porch-Americana dalliance ‘Ballad Of The Broken Seas’. Opposites were seemingly attracted, one became the snug foil of the other and it just worked, much against the odds of some logics. It was akin to a granite block and feather hurled from a mountain top and falling, somehow, in beautiful unison. They languished under a beautiful melancholy together, where their conflicting sensibilities met and entwined. It’s a pleasant surprise that what was presumed to be a never-again-the-twain-shall-meet one-off, caught in time before it blew off on a warm desert wind, is reprised on ‘Sunday At Devil Dirt’.
Though that’s all we really expected, a repeat, more of the same. The formula was a fairly straightforward matter after all – ominous Johnny Cash minor-key track beds, the juxtaposed clash between his twelve-tonne tonsils and her barely-there waif-like gasps, and the subsequent witch’s brew of harmony. And as ‘Seafaring Song’ starts up as an quietly plucked shanty in the deep dead of night, their voices creeping in haunting parallel, that seems a likely outcome.
But the detached Morricone-esque, spaghetti western strings that take up position just out of focus, lending a further brooding air, bring a new class that extends with equal subtlety though ‘The Raven’ and more obviously on the brilliant ‘Come On Over (Turn Me On)’, a rousing James Bond theme tune in waiting. The effective, intuitive use of strings throughout the record recalls Nick Cave & Warren Ellis’ recent soundtrack work and stands as testament to the development of their songwriting foundation. Creatively we consider this marriage well and truly consummated. We can only hope for repeated celebrations of that into the future.