Worth the wait
Isobel Campbell’s delayed fifth solo album is a sunny celebration of her life in California
Isobel Campbell’s breathy, girlish voice has been missing from music for the best part of a decade, since she retired her oppositesattract partnership with gruff grunge balladeer Mark Lanegan and settled in the US.
Her absence has not entirely been of her own choosing. There Is No Other, her long awaited fifth solo album (including two as The Gentle Waves following her departure from cult indie troupe Belle & Sebastian) was recorded five years ago but consigned to legal limbo when her new record company folded and Campbell had to fight for the right to license it herself.
In spite of its fraught passage to release and some of the pointed lyrics (“vultures circling round”, “tired of all the bullshit”), it’s a calming collection. There is an element of selfcomforting in the holistic mantras Just For Today and See Your Face Again, while the sparse arrangements with chiming percussion and wilting strings are reminiscent of her past collaborations with Bill Wells.
Campbell would probably say this is her California record, but
City of Angels is a Los Angeles song unlike any other – light, delicate and winsome in its intimate use of acoustic guitar, gentle strings and subtle sleigh bells.
Ant Life casts a mellow eye over the LA rat race and the beguiling torch ballad Boulevard is her meditation on inequality in America. The whimsical everyday romance of Counting Fireflies is closer to a wistful Simon & Garfunkel ballad, but the psychedelic sighing strings and country-folk guitar of The National Bird of India are redolent of LA’S classic Laurel Canyon scene and she reimagines the rootsy rock’n’roll of Tom Petty’s Runnin’ Down a Dream as a Belle & Sebastian-like beat pop number. Best of all, she issues a warm, intoxicating southern soul prayer for the earth on The Heart Of It All and gilds Hey World with uplifting gospel backing vocals.
Following collaborations with Jools Holland, John Harle and Mark Ravenhill and a high profile reunion of Soft Cell, Marc Almond teams up with longtime wingman Chris Braide for this new album of originals. Chaos and a Dancing Star, titled after a quote from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, was initially conceived as a prog rock collection of “apocalyptic love songs” but its wan odes to cars and cemeteries with occasional gurning guitar licks sound like they have been beamed in from 70s MOR land, while Almond the overwrought balladeer is largely denied the opportunity to show off his vocal chops.
Almond is nothing if not versatile, and there’s a bloody-minded perversity in opting for such musical anachronism. The light touch orchestration and freewheeling spirit of Cherry Tree and wistful piano ballad Dreaming of Sea are among the best of a banal bunch and Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson livens up Lord of Misrule on flute.
Fife folk singer/songwriter James Yorkston, English jazz bassist
Jon Thorne and Indian sarangi maestro and singer Suhail Yusuf Khan continue to make fertile connections between British and Irish folk song and the sacred music of the Indian subcontinent in their Yorkston/thorne/khan collaboration. Murder ballad Twa Brothers is intertwined with Indian mouth music, while Robert Burns’ Westlin’ Winds is conjoined with the work of Hindustani mystic Hazrat Amir Khusrau on their third album Navarasa: Nine Emotions.
Each track pertains to one of the nine emotions or sentiments associated with artistic expression – sorrow, disgust, anger, laughter, surprise/wonder, love/beauty, terror/ fear, heroism/courage and peace/ tranquillity – though the mood most readily evoked by most of the tracks is the latter.
Almond the overwrought balladeer is largely denied the opportunity to show off his vocal chops