Isobel Campbel and Mark Lanegan return with their third - and finest - album to date...
The symbol of the hawk holds a certain fascination for songwriter Isobel Campbell. To the extent that it provides a pertinent metaphor for her new album, as well as its title."I like the different connotations of hawk," she expounds, "as a noun and an adjective. And the idea that to hawk also means to sell, to peddle. In Native American folklore Hawk is akin to mercury and is seen as a messenger to the Gods. Hawks are visionaries and observers. Representing awareness, inspiration and the soul. Hawk medicine unites heaven and earth. Hawks mate for life. For me the hawk also represents aviation... We clocked up a lot of air miles making this record! In Egyptian tradition Hawk was associated with magic and shape shifting. Hawk portents of change. It seems very symbolic of what I've been feeling and what I've been going through."
Turns out there's another, more direct, reason for using the name too... "The place where I stay in Sabino Canyon, Arizona is in the mountains and there are often hawks in the trees, just sitting there, having lunch. Watching you."
Recorded in such disparate places as California, Texas, Louisiana, Denmark, Edinburgh and her native Glasgow, "Hawk" is a pan-continental affair. There's folk, country, blues, gospel, dream-pop and a fair spoonful of Southern soul. The album also finds Campbell rejoined by Mark Lanegan, gruff sage of Screaming Trees and Queens Of The Stone Age fame, with whom she recorded the Mercury-nominated Ballad Of The Broken Seas (2006) and the smouldering Sunday At Devil Dirt (2008). There they duetted on wounded tales of loss, lust and regret, set amid an existential land of western noir and heightened Americana. The kind of emotive terrain traced by the novels of Larry McMurty or Cormac McCarthy, perhaps. Or a more ambiguous postscript to the classic songs of Nancy and Lee.
"Hawk" - written, produced and arranged by Campbell - is altogether more expansive. Ace American songwriter Willy Mason guests on two songs, while there's not only a wider sweep of styles there's often a more urgent approach. "Get Behind Me" and "You Won't Let Me Down" are cases in point. "I can get so annoyed sometimes. I can do the harder stuff just as well as any man can.. It wasn't like I made a conscious decision to make it tougher - because I really love acoustic music - but I think it was something I just wanted to try. I'd just taken up running as well, so maybe that made me write a little faster! I had all these songs I liked to run to and it inspired me to write something similar." A barrelling tune with no brakes, "Get Behind Me" is reminiscent of Dylan's more blustery blow-outs on Highway 61 Revisited. You can even feel the spectre of Mike Bloomfield on guitar. "You Won't Let Me Down Again" sounds more like an old desert song, complete with deliciously twangy guitar, while retaining a touch of vintage-'69 Fairport Convention. "A crack in the mirror tells of seven years of pain / And you won't let me down again" growls Lanegan in his inimitable baritone, while James Iha, formerly of Smashing Pumpkins, plays guitar. The title track, meanwhile, is a rollicking instrumental that coats a walking blues riff with sax mayhem.
Campbell also emerges as a truly accomplished writer of old-school ballads. She's certainly never composed anything quite so genre-specific as "Come Undone", which feels like a lost Southern treasure from the ‘60s, the kind of song Irma Thomas might once have torched her soul into. It's a classic exercise in thwarted desire, Lanegan intoning over a rising string section: "It's got me on my knees / Tearing up my heart / Shakin' at my bones / Tearing me apart."
There's also "Lately", which invokes turn-of-the-‘70s Dylan with its churchy organ and gospel backing. "Most of the time all I listen to is Dylan anyway. I marvel at Bob Dylan all the time. So it's a natural thing for me to do."
One of the undoubted highlights is "Time Of The Season", wherein a lovelorn couple lament a lost Christmas. It's a delicate beauty that recalls both The Byrds and the sumptuous duets of Bobbie Gentry and Glen Campbell. "I wrote that in Tuscon last summer," laughs Isobel. "I'm so contrary. The temperature was up to 112, I was really homesick and was watching ‘Fairytale of New York' on youtube and Kirsty MacColl singing ‘New England'. So I just thought: why don't I try to write some kind of Christmas song?"
The collaborative process, despite the presence of a couple of Isobel-only songs here, is an integral part of Campbell's work. She confesses to being unfamiliar with the records of Willy Mason before her engineer suggested they do a duet together. The first they tried, a powerfully emotive cover of the great Townes Van Zandt's "No Place To Fall", turned out to be very special indeed. The dovetailing of harmonies sounds even more impressive given that the pair recorded it before they'd even met. "My engineer, Matthew, got Willy to sing it and they sent it back to me the next day. I thought his vocal was amazing. We recorded our parts separately, and I didn't meet him until he played Tuscon in January this year." They also recorded "Cool Water", a slumbery ballad that sounds like it might have been cooked up in the Canyons anytime since 1970.
Further indication of Hawk's free-ranging expressionism comes courtesy of the Lanegan duet, "Eyes Of Green". It's a number with an almost old-world innocence, a song of betrothal that feels like a Celtic/Appalachian reel, replete with fiddle solo. "Take a pair of lonesome blue eyes / And a pair of eyes of green / And you could search the wide world over / They're the prettiest I've ever seen" sings Lanegan, like some romantic desperado from a John Ford film.
From the bedsitland of Belle & Sebastian to solo project The Gentle Waves and now the threshold of a bright new frontier, Isobel Campbell has come a long way. She's still hungry for more too. "This record has been demanding," she says. "I've worked on it for a year and a half and I was fried at the end. But you just know in your gut when something's finished and ready. Every record is a learning process and I just selfishly made the record I wanted to make. But I still feel like I'm on a constant quest to write the perfect song. After every album I think: I can do better, I can do better!" She'll have a hard job topping this one.
Critical acclaim for "Sunday At Devil Dirt", the second album from Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan, released in May 2008.
"the chemistry between the two is riveting... Campbell's songs are simple, direct, gorgeous... If, after the brilliant Ballad, you had said that this pair would reunite and make an even better album, I wouldn't have believed you - but I think they just have"
Sunday Times - 5 Stars ***** (CD of the Week)
"It deserves the attention received by their debut, and then some"
The Observer - CD of the Week
"A modern-day Nancy and Lee... It is no exaggeration to say that, at their best, the songs on Sunday at Devil Dirt sound like instant standards"
The Times - 4 Stars **** (CD of the Week)
"Crackles with sexy chemistry... Lanegan turns in some career-best performances... Way rootsier than Nancy and Lee, these two really hit the spot".
MOJO - 4 Stars ****
"A confident record... there's a lovely tenderness to Lanegan's singing and a playfulness about Campbell's writing..."
Uncut - 4 Stars **** (lead review)
"this follow up collaboration capitalises on the emotional piquancy of the contrast between Lanegan's smoky barritone and Campbell's honeyed tones... highlights are many and varied..."
The Independent - 4 Stars ****
"The beauty and beast formula that worked so well on this duo's 2006 Mercury-nominated album is beautifully fine-tuned here by producer and writer Isobel... The songs skilfully reshape classic folk/blues... The Mercury judges are going to have to give em a second, serious listen."
The Mirror - 4 Stars ****
"As odd couples go, Campbell and Lanegan take some beating. But the combination works a treat here... With strings, church bells and twangy guitars, the unlikely duo dovetail superbly... darkly seductive"
Daily Mail - 4 Stars ****
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