After playing cello with Belle and Sebastian for a few years, what else is a pixie-waif songstress to do besides cut a record with a grizzly ex-frontman?

Write some dark, ethereal folk-pop numbers with Tom Waits in mind, arrange a Hank Williams classic with female vocals and maybe get her bangs trimmed to look more like '60s mod goddess Twiggy.

Since V2 Records released Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan's EP, the pair has finished its first full-length album, Ballad of the Broken Seas. A classic combination of cutesy pop-chick and growly rock-guy, the duo has elicited comparisons to duos Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg as well as Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood. But of course, Lanegan is not quite the leery French chanteur that Gainsbourg was, nor is Campbell the faint-voiced, yet wholly underrated Sinatra.

Campbell is clearly the mastermind behind Ballad of the Broken Seas. She wrote and produced the majority of the songs with Lanegan's voice at the helm. Campbell is the folk wunderkind; Lanegan is just the vehicle through which Campbell channels her ideas and the voice for Campbell's more masculine lyrics.

The duo's musical style draws from rootsy, down-home Americana, imbued with strangely psychedelic instrumentation. Songs like the delicately hymnal "(Do You Wanna) Come Walk With Me?" feature drawn-out guitars, piano and touches of mandolin. The wonderfully titled "Honey Child, What Can I Do?" is based on a violin and cello background, but a jangly banjo bit sneaks in during the outro.

Many of the songs follow a pulsing narrative structure with the love-and-death-centric images of old Johnny Cash songs. Lanegan's gravel-heavy vocals only add to that effect, while Campbell's twee lilt remains airy and distant. On a handful of her tunes, there are no female vocals at all.

"The Circus Is Leaving Town" sounds like heartbreak at home on the range - and despite Cambell's Glasgow origins, obvious influences (Hank Williams, Johnny and June Carter Cash and Loretta Lynn) permeate her music. Ballad of the Broken Seas plays out like a movie soundtrack, a stylish film noir splashed with the gaudy bits of a spaghetti Western.

Though there's the risk of the album being regarded as a novelty, Campbell and Lanegan's ying-yang dynamic makes it seem as if they've been at this for years. On the closing track, Lanegan's voice - once howling for the Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age - is broken down and weary. Finishing off Ballad of the Broken Seas, the song is the best example why Campbell chose Lanegan to sing her songs.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan
Ballad of the Broken Seas
V2