It's looking less likely that Isobel Campbell would ever have accompanied her former group, Belle and Sebastian, on such a conspicuously good-news jaunt as this year's The Life Pursuit. I know, there goes my alternate-reality comic book idea, too. The Glaswegian cellist/chanteuse introduced herself as the glass hidden in the The Boy With the Arab Strap's grass with "Is It Wicked Not to Care?", her first lead vocal turn: "It will all be over when you're dead," she cooed. Following an early string of understated solo releases, Campbell reestablished herself as the haunted Belle on this year's Mercury Prize-nominate Ballad of the Broken Seas, a rust-and-dust Americana duet with ex-Screaming Trees rumbler Mark Lanegan.
Not even nine months later, Milkwhite Sheets again shows Campbell to be not so much twee as fey-- there's a difference, people. On a collection of original and traditional songs, the winsome singer/songwriter strides through the peat-bogged haints and misty moors of British folk music, armed with an acoustic guitar and her trademark cello. Unfortunately, her girlish voice is drab beside Anne Briggs' mournful peal or the dewy, honey-throated quirks of Shirley Collins-- English folk icons whose doctrinal styles Campbell approximates here, with less breathtaking results. It's not Lanegan that Milkwhite Sheets misses, exactly. But this album could definitely use the sort of counterpoint his creaking overland gruffness gave her previous effort.
It's difficult to slag a folk album for being unoriginal, but the letdown here is that Milkwhite Sheets sounds uninspired at a time when so many musicians are digging treasure from the same ancient, mist-shrouded hills. The freak-folk scene's new weird Americana sometimes may as well be called the new weird Britannica: Druidic airs about meadows, cyclopes, and kings underpin the baroque psychedelia of outsized Philadelphia collective Espers, while San Francisco-based Vetiver filter English folk's ensorcelled strings and droning acoustic guitars through dreamy Marc Bolan workouts, and Brooklyn trio White Magic tangles banshees up in kudzu. Without even getting into Devendra Banhart or Joanna Newsom, there's also Colin Meloy's Sings Shirley Collins EP, Epitaph sea-shanty comp Rogue's Gallery, and the entire pre-2006 catalogue of modern English folkie James Yorkston. In other words, Campbell can't exactly just coast here; other people have heard this stuff, too.
Still, it's clear Campbell has discovered a genuine love for the genre, even if she doesn't take it to particularly stirring conclusions. Spare, chime-accented opener "O Love Is Teasin'" provides a pretty good indication of where the album is headed, "then fades away like the mornin' dew," as Campbell sings softly. Like the frail, a cappella "Loving Hannah", it's a tale of a love done wrong, though on the latter the male/female characters are reversed. Elsewhere, as on "Yearning" or the instrumental title track, Campbell layers a cello here, an echoey acoustic guitar there to carve out a sleepy niche in the foggy ancestral forest. Instrumental "James" nods toward Nick Drake's "Cello Song" in both its lead instrument and its clip-clop conga-drum rhythm, but lacks its forebear's fragile humanity and distinctive, guttural melody.
Only toward the album's conclusion does Campbell hint at the even more haunted possibilities she may have in mind. Strings grind, bluster, and swoop on the murderous instrumental "Over the Wheat and the Barley". Dream-like finale "Thursday's Child" uses a light tambourine and deep drum to anchor pinging, opiate reflections, resulting in the album's best-- and least traditional-- tune. "Take this longing and make it something real," Campbell sings, like a pixie Leonard Cohen. Her desire for a self-indulgent "hobby album" (her words) whetted, perhaps Campbell will take this track's hazy languor and Ballad of the Broken Sea's purposeful grandeur and turn in another triumph. Word is her next duet album is with Giant Sand's Howe Gelb. Now there's a fantasy lineup I'd never even contemplated.
