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

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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