Hawk

The cover of Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan's third album together (after 2006's Mercury-nominated Ballad of the Broken Seas and 2008's Sunday at Devil Dirt) shows the pair in the front of a car, seemingly on a cross-country drive. It's an apt choice, because the album, their best yet, traces a musical road trip across America. Only the Celtic fiddles of "Eyes of Green" might suggest that Campbell hails from Glasgow rather than Galveston. "We Die and See Beauty Reign" is Nancy and Lee by way of Bonnie and Clyde ("Our banks foreclose, our fortunes fade/ Our alibis are retrograde"), "Come Undone" is an unapologetic homage to James Brown's "It's a Man's World," "To Hell and Back Again" has the nocturnal desert ambience of Mazzy Star, and there are two cover versions of the quintessential Nashville casualty, Townes van Zandt. Apart from the slightly ill-fitting blues-rockers "Get Behind Me" and "Hawk," every one of Campbell's compositions has the glow of classic Americana.

Lanegan has the presence of a Cormac McCarthy character and a voice as deep and dark as a collapsed mine shaft, which leads many collaborators (Soulsavers, UNKLE) to lean on him for eerie gravitas, but… read more »