Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan

Theres a certain beauty and the beast quality to the greatest male/female singer/songwriter duos Consider Jane Birkin, the well-heeled toast of 60s society, hooking up with Serge Gainsbourg, the filthy Gallic singer/songwriters ever-present gauze of Gauloise smoke irreversibly clouding her reputation. Or theres Nancy Sinatra, the golden daughter of the Chairman Of The Board, whose career was rescued from its early doldrums thanks to the intervention of producer Lee Hazlewood, who injected a gravely, cynical tone that gave Nancys subsequent records a disquieting, idiosyncratic charm. And so it is with Ballad Of The Broken Seas, an album length collaboration between Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan.

Theres a similar sense of contrast, between Isobels aching, pristine chill of a vocal, and Lanegans wounded, regret-stewed burr. Their musical backpages could hardly be more different; Isobel found her initial fame playing cello and singing with deftly-melodic Glaswegian indie collective Belle & Sebastian, before branching off for the lushly-orchestrated melancholia of her Gentle Waves for two LPs, and releasing her debut solo album, the acclaimed Amorino, in 2003. Lanegan, on the other hand, sang for Screaming Trees, perhaps the greatest and most underrated of all the grunge bands, until their dissolution in 2000, since when he has juggled the solo career he began while still in the Trees, and a unique role as occasional frontman of Queens Of The Stoneage. The sweet, folksy girl and the grizzled rawk guy; a classic cocktail, perhaps, but the roles are inverted, in this case.