I picked up the Isobel Campbell/Mark Lanegan collaboration, "Ballad of the Broken Seas." I figured she used to be in Belle and Sebastian, he nearly lost me there, and it's a country album, so it's bound to be something interesting and cool.
I wanted really badly to like it, but I just don't think I can. The vocals are breathy(hers), whispery (his), occasionally Leonard-Coheny(his again), and nearly always buried in the mix and hard to understand. It's kind of dark and moody and atmospheric--sounds like maybe it should be used in a David Lynch movie. I mean, it's well done, but overall, it seems like mood music for a mood I may never be in.
There is a moment, though, when he says, "A crimson bird flies when I go down on you." Eeeww! Still nice to see that my English major is useful--combined with regular Savage Love reading, my finely-honed interpretive skills allowed me to find a thinly-veiled "red wings" reference!
In other country-related news, I caught an episode of "Trick My Truck" on Country Music Television last night. You could just hear the pitch: "It's like "Pimp My Ride," but not at all ethnic!" It was a pretty standard "make over something for the person with the hard luck story" show, and enjoyable in that respect. I have to say, though, that the acting was way worse on this than on most reality shows.
(They do require acting. When I was on a reality show (Really! Go here and cue up the episode 7 clip if you don't believe me!), they were never quite ready when something interesting happened, so the sound guy or the camera guy would be like, "oh, what you just said was really good, but I wasn't ready--so if you can just pretend you're walking into the room and being surprised again, we'll get it this time.. So this kind of stuff on Trick My Truck is just painfully bad. Like when the trick-ee finds the chrome mafia or whoever climbing on his truck and says, kind of half-heartedly, "hey. What are you doing on my truck." I have to imagine that climbing on some guy's truck while he peed at the truck stop would be a really good way to get yourself beaten senseless with a tire iron in real life. Don't know that I'll ever watch it again, but it was a pleasant enough way to pass a half hour.
