Isobel Campbell was the second-best singer-- and best cellist-- in Belle and Sebastian. Mark Lanegan fronted grunge almost-weres Screaming Trees, one of those odd bands that everyone knows but few listen to, and he did a stint in Queens of the Stone Age. Given Belle and Sebastian's penchant for lacy chamber pop and the Screaming Trees/QOTSA bias toward angrily trippy stoner jams, it only makes sense that Campbell's and Lanegan's collaboration produced a bunch of mildly acerbic sea shanties and maudlin dust-bowl folk ballads.

"Deus Ibi Est" establishes Ballad of the Broken Seas's mise en scène-- a broad, desolate expanse of metronomic kickdrum and lilting acoustic guitar. Lanegan slips into a Grinchy beatnik drawl, doing Tom Waits doing Leonard Cohen, sharpishly channeling the voice of an itinerant soldier, while Campbell's airy Latin hook (the dead language kind, not the Ricky Martin kind) sounds as if all the Whos down in Whoville wandered into a seedy wharf bar.

If you really wanna cut the roast beast, let's say it plain: While Campbell's contributions to the album are far from negligible, the thing reeks of Lanegan, aligning itself with the hard-bitten American roots music of his solo albums. Lanegan's boozy, melancholic growl and down-and-out imagery on "The Circus Is Leaving Town" would fit comfortably on a Crooked Fingers record, that pacesetter for all things indie-gone-Americana. He turns in an appropriately smoldering cover of Hank Williams's "Ramblin' Man", Campbell's whispered taunts and supplications skewing its narrative POV. Even openly sentimental songs like the hushed, piano-driven title track acquire a thin layer of grit: "We fucked up the sun to kingdom come/ You were under my blood and my skin." Campbell's presence seems unavoidably minimized on the duets, as her gusty chirp flutters through the holes in Lanegan's decaying clapboard shack of a voice, yet it's also indispensable, like the color commentary on a televised golf match.

Some of the record's most penetrating moments arrive when either Lanegan or Campbell take center stage alone. Lanegan's "(Do You Wanna) Come Walk With Me?", despite moments of implied, discomforting pederasty ("Little girl, have I told you how you light up my life?/ Come and lay down beside me, come and thrill me tonight"), features the inarguably vivid and arresting lyrical turn, "There's a crimson bird flying when I go down on you." Campbell takes the lead on "Black Mountain" and "Saturday's Gone", her voice cascading over quivering strings and swirling arpeggios on the former, and riding in on clip-clopping hooves on the latter. The thirty-odd years of musical experience Campbell and Lanegan collectively possess are worn like sun-creased skin on Ballad of the Broken Seas, which manages to be consistently engaging and sufficiently memorable without making too much fuss about it.

-Brian Howe, March 14, 2006