Swansong For You

Swansong For You is the second ‘solo’ album of string-soaked and heart broken love songs from Isobel Campbell, cellist and songwriter with Belle and Sebastian.

There has been a marked improvement in Ms Campbell’s lyrical prowess since her early songs for that band – and indeed since the first Gentle Waves album, The Green Fields Of Foreverland, which was a bit too gauchely pseudo-esoteric for my tastes.

Isobel’s tiny, tear-stained voice breathes tender tales of hurt and longing, disappointment and loneliness “with an almost religious quality” (Partner In Crime). Although most of the sentiments are acutely personal, she’s enlisted a large coterie of friends to add their tuppence-worth of flute or glockenspiel on the musical front, including various members of her ‘other’ band.

Her fascination with retro Gallic aesthetics has her picking and re-threading the melodies of sixties chanteuse Françoise Hardy’s ‘Tous Les Garçons et Les Filles’ on more than one occasion, as well as echoing Brel-fanaticist Scott Walker, on the ‘Duchess’-like ‘Loretta Young’ or in the deeply-dramatic arrangement of ‘Partner In Crime’.

Apart from the slightly cringe-worthy effort at a finger-clicking Nancy Sinatra-style number, ‘Sisterwoman’, (and overlooking the fact that she sometimes wobbles out of tune) Swansong is a charming piece of work, sweet but not entirely innocent and delicately displaying a fragile and crushable heart.