ISOBEL CAMPBELL & MARK LANEGAN return in August 2010 with ‘HAWK’, their third – and finest – album to date, on V2/Cooperative Music… This will be followed by a performance at the Barbican in September… info and album artwork below…
Friday 10 September – LONDON – Barbican (£12.50 / £15 / £20)
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 folklore Hawk is akin to mercury and is seen as a messenger to the Gods. Hawks are visionaries and observers.”
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.
‘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. A barrelling tune with no brakes, “Get Behind Me” is reminiscent of Dylan’s more blustery blow-outs on Highway 61 Revisited. “You Won’t Let Me Down Again” sounds more like an old desert song, complete with deliciously twangy guitar. “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.
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. One of the many other highlights is “Time Of The Season”, wherein a lovelorn couple lament a lost Christmas.
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… ‘Hawk‘ is released 16th August on V2 / Cooperative Music…
COLD WAR KIDS are set to release a five song EP – ‘Behave Yourself’ – on 19th January on Downtown / Cooperative Music and available for purchase at itunes, Amazon, and your favourite record store.
