Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan - Hawk

By 2010 the Campbell and Lanegan partnership had four years and two albums behind it, starting with the Mercury Prize-shortlisted Ballad of the Broken Seas in 2006 and continuing through Sunday At Devil Dirt in 2008. Hawk is the one where they stopped playing to type. Written, arranged and produced entirely by Campbell and recorded across studios in Scotland, England and the United States, it stretches the canvas well past the hushed country-folk that made their name.

Thirteen tracks that move from dusty southern soul to garage-rock stomp to full gospel sweep. Lead single "You Won't Let Me Down Again" rides a hypnotic groove into a searing mid-song solo from former Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha. "Come Undone" is a slow-burning soul ballad with Lanegan at his most exposed. The pair turn in two Townes Van Zandt covers, "Snake Song" and "No Place To Fall," the latter with guest vocals from Willy Mason, and closer "Lately" trades their usual duet interplay for a brass-tinged gospel choir. Campbell's ethereal arrangements against that gravelled baritone remain the engine, but the room around it is bigger here than anywhere else in their catalog.

The final chapter of the trilogy the two made together, and the most ambitious of the three. Since Lanegan's death in 2022, these records read as one of the great late-career reinventions in his long, restless run from Screaming Trees through Queens of the Stone Age and beyond.

Reissued November 6th on LP after years out of print on the format. Forty-eight minutes of the pair at their widest reach, worth having on wax before it disappears again.