Three albums in, the combination still feels unlikely: the once-chirpy Scottish twee star hooking up with the gravelly, drugged-out ex-grunge guy to make warm, languid movie-soundtrack Americana. Nothing in that last sentence seems like it should work. But former Belle and Sebastian singer/cellist Isobel Campbell and former Screaming Trees frontman Lanegan have the sort of chemistry that nobody can fully explain. Their voices hang suspended in the air together, Campbell's feathery light and Lanegan's thick and downtrodden.
The obvious point of comparison, and the one that critics have made over and over again with these two, is Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood, and the parallels certainly work. Like Nancy and Lee, Campbell and Lanegan's world-weary sprite/cowboy act lends a nice angelic/demonic dichotomy to everything they do. Every time they sing together, the two sound like they've just gotten done with a particularly satisfying fuck. But on Hawk, they remind me just as much of Mazzy Star in the way they boil roots-rock down to narcotic shuffle and swoony desert atmosphere. And if they haven't quite come up with their own "Fade Into You" yet, give them time.
All sorts of quintessentially American genres go into the stew here: country, folk, blues, rockabilly, 50s torch-song elegance. "Come Undone", with its weepy drawn-out strings, is a pretty great stab at old-school Memphis soul. Scraggly-voiced singer-songwriter Willy Mason stands in for Lanegan on a spare, unrushed cover of Townes Van Zandt's "No Place to Fall". The acoustic-blues stomper "Snake Song" would make a way better theme to the ridiculously entertaining Elmore Leonard-derived TV show "Justified" than that Everlast-sounding piece of crap the show currently has. And all throughout, Campbell sings without a trace of her thick Scottish accent. It's tough to believe this is the same girl who sang "Is It Wicked Not to Care?".
When I interviewed her a few weeks back, Campbell talked about how hard it was to find drummers that knew how to play this material right. Most drummers, naturally, want to play fills and show off, but the way Campbell approaches this Americana demands a certain spacey restraint. And thank god she put in the effort to find the right players. Plenty of these songs would sound a bit hacky if they weren't done the airy, humid way they are here; this is definitely an album that depends more on vibe than on songs. More than on previous Campbell/Lanegan albums, things get a bit raucous here from time to time; chugging guitars and galloping drums turn up with surprising frequency. But even the more riff-heavy songs give Campbell and Lanegan enough room to develop the sandpaper/chiffon chemistry they need. The only glaring misstep on the album, actually, is the instrumental title track, a squealy and chaotic fusion of free jazz and rockabilly that punctures the mood way too much.
Hawk is very much Campbell's album. She made all the big artistic decisions, her face is front and center on the cover, and Lanegan shows up on only eight of the album's 13 tracks. But whenever she shares a track with Lanegan (or, a couple of times here, with Willy Mason), her sylph of a voice fades into the background. That really just means that Campbell knows how to make her songs work. Lanegan's craggy mutter is almost a natural wonder, and in Campbell's luxurious beds of reverbed-out country, it's found a pretty perfect resting spot. No reason this odd pair can't keep on cranking out slabs of low-key bliss like this one.
