Campbell and Lanegan’s debut Ballad Of The Broken Seas was a play for oppositional voices that used Lee and Nancy as the template but stopped just short of cute. Sunday At Devil Dirt, the follow-up, is deeper, darker and even more substantial.
The record opens with ‘Seafaring Song’, the equivalent of the creaky, creepy scene in Jaws where Scheider, Dreyfuss and Shaw sit around quaffing rum, comparing scars and swapping stories, except here we get strains of Morricone drifting through the open porthole.
Elsewhere, on ‘The Raven’ (of course), bells toll, guitars are strummed, strings swoon, and Lanegan delivers his most mordant vocal to date (no mean feat) sounding like Lee Van Cleef resurrected in the Pacific Northwest. ‘Who Built The Road’ is weighted with similar gravitas, yet embroidered with the most evocative string arrangements since Mick Harvey’s Intoxicated Man. Lanegan is at his absolute peak here, a second-hand man torn between the bible and the bottle.
Not that it’s all heavy going. ‘Salvation’ is almost whimsical (“My blood is thick and so is my old grey hide”) while ‘Come On Over (Turn Me On)’ embellishes a backing track that’s a ringer for ‘I Put A Spell On You’ with slow and scorching motel blues guitar. Similarly, ‘Back Burner’ is ‘70s hot buttered soul filtered through the Doc’s Gris Gris, and ‘The Flame That Burns’ takes up where the pair’s Waitsian cover of Hank’s ‘Ramblin’ Man’ left off, applying Mark Ribot and Michael Blair sensibilities to shuffling country blues.
Campbell is obviously a generous spirit, seemingly content to hover behind her man like some gingham princess, particularly on gorgeously formal Elizabethan/Appalachian ballads like ‘Keep Me In Mind Sweetheart’. The exception is ‘Shot Gun Blues’, where she plays the hot-to-trot trailer park succubus urging her sugar daddy towards unspeakable acts.
All human experience is here. Sunday At Devil Dirt is a beautiful thing.