Album Review

Sunday At Devil Dirt, the second album from Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan, was released back in May and is yet another example of a bizarre trend in the music business. I’m not sure what you would call it, but let’s go with Duet Chic. After all, in the past few years we’ve seen the unlikely pairing of a hard-rock god and a bluegrass star (Robert Plant and Allison Krauss), the so-odd-it-works match-up of an indie-rock veteran and an actress (M. Ward and Zooey Deschanel), and, hot off the press, the white-hot Bond-theme collaboration between Modern Rock and R&B royalty (Jack White and Alicia Keys.) It’s as if the old-fashioned idea of a boy and a girl singing together is so retro that it’s novel again.

But none of those pairs can claims such opposite ends of the spectrum as Campbell and Lanegan. She is best-known for her stint with the twee art-poppers Belle & Sebastian; he comes from the hardest of hard-rock lineages, as former leader of Screaming Trees and one-time member of Queens Of The Stone Age. And yet the music they come up with (mostly written by Campbell), doesn’t approach either of those styles by a mile.

The two instead have settled upon a polished approximation of age-old genres like folk and the blues, sweetened a little bit by a generous helping of strings to make the medicine go down a bit easier. They don’t break any new ground in particular, but the odd blend of Lanegan’s Leonard Cohen-croak and Campbell’s spectral cooing is a combination that works somehow and lends this whole affair an alluring, otherworldly glow.

The opener is a great grabber to get you hooked. With the title “Seafaring Song,” you might expect a rollicking shanty. Instead you get an austere folk ballad with violins lurking in the distance, as if they don’t want to get too close to the proceedings. The seafaring done here is more like an endless drift with no thought of safe harbor. Lanegan embodies the last traveler with spooky precision, while Campbell chimes in like the siren that called him off to his doom. Any hints of happiness are now distant memories, made clear when the pair end each verse with a gloomy refrain of “that was such a long, long time ago.”

Listen to “Seafaring Song”

The heaviness can be too overbearing at times, especially on the bluesier attempts. “Back Burner,” with its chain-gang backing vocals, putters about for too long, and “Shot Gun Blues,” with its slide guitar overload and sex-as-weapon metaphors, was best left in the Delta. And all further attempts by musicians to wrangle Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” into song form should be hereby suspended indefinitely.

Listen to “Back Burner”
Listen to “Shot Gun Blues”

The pair fares better when they keep things simple and let their unique vocal mix take center stage. They strike seductive poses on “Come On Over (Turn Me On),” which, with its slinky strings and hushed, come-hither vocals, would be perfect for a Mad Men episode. And the gentle, straightforward pleasures of “Something To Believe” and “Keep Me In Mind Sweetheart” have a beguiling timelessness about them.

Listen to “Come On Over (Turn Me On)”

Lanegan and Campbell’s voices are so different that they don’t even need to harmonize; often they sing the same notes and still sound worlds apart and yet somehow in synch. When they just let those voices tell the tales, simple and familiar as they might be, Sunday At Devil Dirt weaves a captivating spell.

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