My recommendations 2006:Milk White Sheets by Isobel Campbell

Isobel Campbell: Milk White Sheets
V2 11/7/2006

Regular readers of this blog will undoubtedly have noticed that my recommendations have, up until just now, appeared alphabetically. The reason for this deviation from my anal-retentive routine is that Milk White Sheets is going to be officially released in the U.S. tomorrow morning and I have already passed Ca.

Milk White Sheets, Campbell's second album of the year, is about evenly split between traditional folk songs and her own compositions. Because of its obvious Britannic leanings, there are surely going to be comparisons to Vashti Bunyan ad nauseam in the music press in the next week. Now, I absolutely love Vashti Bunyan and I would never want to even appear to knock her, but I could never mistake her for Isobel Campbell. Campbell's voice isn't as polished, but it's much more vibrant and optimistic than Bunyan's, most likely due to her relative youth. Additionally, Milk White Sheets has a greater emphasis on the instrumentation than on either Vashti Bunyan album, whose arrangements were crafted specifically to showcase her voice. Campbell wrote and arranged her own music in order to complement rather than supplement her voice. The result is a beautiful album that's even more consistently enjoyable than the excellent collaborative album she released with Mark Lanegan earlier this year.