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ISOBEL CAMPBELL

Isobel Campbell

Bow To Love

    Isobel Campbell is no stranger to navigating turmoil. On her previous album, There Is No Other (2020), she re-emerged after a decade of label trouble with a gem of subtly questing psychedelic folk. Four years on, Campbell spreads her net wider on Bow to Love, a soft-spun yet sharp-edged set of reflections on modern crises that doesn’t stop at diagnosing the problems: it goes further to ask how we might progress from our tense, conflicted times.

    With all the dexterity the Glasgow-born singer-songwriter and cellist is known for, the result is an album of lambent surfaces and choppy riptides, a deeply personal record for today poised between hope and despair. “The album is about what we’re all in right now, and my response to that and my life as a microcosm within that,” says Campbell, before suggesting how exposing modern horrors might prove purgative. “I think there’s a quote from A Course In Miracles which says, ‘Love brings up everything unlike itself for the purpose of healing and release.’ Maybe these horrible things are coming up and out so we can get rid of them and things can be better.”

    Her radar keenly attuned to inequities, Campbell spotlights toxic masculinity on the luminous ‘Everything Falls Apart,’ it’s circling lilt and warm, fretless bass framing a call to unmask patriarchal power in readiness for “a brand new start”. “My elegy to the patriarchy” is how Campbell pitches it, noting how “even the words we use to insult a substandard man will often blame the woman – ‘son of a bitch’, ‘bastard’.” The spellbinding psych-folk of ‘Spider to the Fly’ and ‘Second Guessing’ add themes of “narcissistic abuse” and “repetition compulsion”, lending bite to the album’s take on relationships.

    Some songs were first conceptualised in 2016, when Brexit and Trump exacerbated what Campbell describes as “real tension” amongst people. Between its gently jazzy shuffle and cushioning arrangement, the Yoda-esque ‘Do Or Die’ foregrounds fortitude in the face of gnawing anxieties. The rainy-day soul-pop of ‘Keep Calm Carry On’ also started in 2016, when Campbell was staying at her aunt’s flat in Yoker and her then-husband and collaborator Chris Szczech texted her from New York about the Brexit vote. “Chris was saying, ‘It looks like it’s going to happen’ but I was like, ‘No way.’ And actually – ‘way’. It did happen.”

    Technology is touched on with first single ‘4316’, an almost robo-folk-pop challenge to the idea of the “transhuman”: the idea that technology might sire a new stage in human evolution. Favouring “honest, decent communication” over AI, Campbell takes a dim view of our “friend, unfriend, block, unblock” culture. “I know what I love and it ain’t that,” she says. “I was talking to an Uber driver the other day and I said, ‘I don’t want to be living in a video game.’ And he said, ‘Well, we are.’ I feel like I’m offering a human element in these transhuman days of artificial intelligence.”

    The looping sing-song swing of the title track applies that open, complex thinking to myths about love: “It’s not enough to bow to love” is the full lyric, offering a grown-up take on the matter. “I grew up loving The Beatles and ‘All You Need Is Love’,” Isobel says, “but sometimes love’s not enough. Sometimes love can get a bit wonky. Love brings up everything - good, bad, ugly - and it can push your buttons.”

    To close the album, a warm cover of Dire Straits’s ‘Why Worry’ disregards any hipster disdain for Mark Knopfler’s band to find a core of consolation at the song’s heart. “I never really bought into all that hipster stuff,” says Campbell. “If something speaks to me, it speaks to me. My dad had all those records and I would always sing it to myself.”

    In making the album, Campbell chose an environment that spoke to her. She recorded and co-produced the record with Szczech in his studio in Los Angeles, sticking with what works through the upheaval in their personal lives. “Chris Szczech and I made this record no longer as a couple. There’s been shit tons going on but then as I tell myself, things come up to be addressed and dealt with.”

    The result is an inquisitive, complex and fully matured album from an artist who has travelled long and far. Campbell was first noticed as a teenage founder member of Belle & Sebastian, before she released two dream-folk solo albums under the name The Gentle Waves and left B&S in 2002. Two records under her own name followed, leading to a union with late rock-carved growler Mark Lanegan for three albums of gravel’n’honey Americana duets, where Lanegan would stand aside while Campbell called the creative shots.

    A move to LA and a near-decade of label troubles followed; the latter ended with There Is No Other in 2020 before – as Campbell puts it – “the world went down the crapper” for the pandemic. And on Bow to Love, suggests Campbell, the world’s ongoing troubles are clear. “Anyone with two eyes, a brain and a heart can see that people are struggling, and I suppose I have a lot of thoughts about that. And it’s this album.”

    An album that also, says Campbell, has thoughts about how the future remains unwritten. “I feel like we’re living in some kind of dystopia, but I think it’s up to us what we buy into and what we react to. We do have a choice, even if sometimes we think we don’t. You can still see acts of great kindness. In all the bleakness, that’s what I hang on to. We are co-creators. Where we go next is up to us.” Mounted with clear-sighted artistry and care, Bow to Love is a light in the dark of uncertain times.


    TRACK LISTING

    1. Everything Falls Apart
    2. Do Or Die
    3. Spider To The Fly
    4. Second Guessing
    5. Bow To Love
    6. 4316
    7. Dopamine
    8. Keep Calm Carry On
    9. Saturday’s Son
    10. Take This Poison
    11. Om Shanti Om
    12. You
    13. Why Worry

    Isobel Campbell

    Amorino

      Following excellent reviews for her recent solo album, 'There Is No Other...', released earlier this year, Isobel Campbell will reissue her third and fourth solo albums, Amorino and Milkwhite Sheets via Cooking Vinyl.

      'Amorino' is the third solo album from the former Belle & Sebastian member Isobel Campbell. Obsessed with French New Wave, chanson, vintage European cinema, the beat girls and boys of the 1960’s, White Horses by Jacky, Peter Sellers and the bossa nova of Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto, Campbell, alongside fellow maverick composer and Scottish national treasure Bill Wells set about making their homage to such things. 

      TRACK LISTING

      1. Amorino
      2. The Breeze Whispered Your Name
      3. Monologue For An Old True Love
      4. October's Sky
      5. The Cat's Pyjamas
      6. Why Does My Head Hurt So?
      7. Johnny Come Home
      8. Poor Butterfly
      9. Love For Tomorrow
      10. There Is No Greater Gold
      11. This Land Flows With Milk
      12. Song For Baby
      13. Time Is Just The Same

      Isobel Campbell

      Milkwhite Sheets

        Originally release in 2006, "Milkwhite Sheets" was conceived and recorded in tandem and shortly after "Ballad Of The Broken Seas". It's a piercingly beautiful set of traditional folk songs and originals, on the surface tranquil, with turbulence underneath. More intimate, more deftly twisted than "Ballad…", it draws on broader and more personal influences.

        TRACK LISTING

        1. O Love Is Teasin'
        2. Willow's Song
        3. Yearning
        4. James
        5. Hori Horo
        6. Reynardine
        7. Milkwhite Sheets
        8. Cachel Wood
        9. Beggar, Wiseman Or Thief
        10. Loving Hannah
        11. Are You Going To Leave Me?
        12. Over The Wheat & The Barley
        13. Thursday's Child

        Isobel Campbell

        There Is No Other…

          Long awaited new solo album from Isobel Campbell. 

          It's been 10 years (yes really) since her last album, "Hawk", which was her third collaboration with Mark Lanegan and 14 since her last solo album, but it's been worth the wait. 

          Drawing on everything from the twee indie pop of Belle & Sebastian, 60s pop, and the dark Americana of her Lanegan collaborations, this is an absolute gem of a record.





          TRACK LISTING

          1. City Of Angels
          2. Runnin’ Down A Dream
          3. Vultures
          4. Ant Life
          5. Rainbow
          6. The Heart Of It All
          7. Hey World
          8. The National Bird Of India
          9. Just For Today
          10. See Your Face Again
          11. Boulevard
          12. Counting Fireflies
          13. Below Zero


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