Joe's Pub was on the warm side Monday night, but that didn't prevent the cellist-chanteuse Isobel Campbell from starting her set in a fur-cuffed vintage leather jacket and knit winter tam. The jacket was off by the third song, but the lid, a crucial part of her thrift-store mod look, remained. With her pale makeup, dark eyeliner and faraway gaze, Ms. Campbell was every bit the misfit lovely.
On her latest solo effort, "Ballad of Broken Seas," this feathery Scottish vocalist diverges quite a bit from the clever, elegant pop of Belle and Sebastian, her former group. A collaboration with the gravel-voiced singer Mark Lanegan, the album is full of western gothic tunes and murder balladry. One thing that hasn't changed though, is Ms. Campbell's preference for subtlety to the point of near disappearance. On the new album, she plays breathy will-o-the-wisp to Mr. Lanegan's storm-cloud cowboy.
She isn't the strongest singer in the world. But there's something powerful about the way Ms. Campbell casts herself as muse. For this tour, Eugene Kelly, of the early 1990's indie-pop legends the Vaselines, has taken over Mr. Lanegan's parts and his de facto anchoring role. On Monday, his low, roiling voice played off Ms. Campbell's ghostly one in a different way than Mr. Lanegan's rumble. Reportedly, she and Mr. Kelly are writing some new songs together, material that will likely have a different mood altogether.
Clad in black, the serious-visaged Mr. Kelly brought a dystopian gravitas to duets like "False Husband." On the album, the song is an atmospheric toggle between a kind of Lee Hazelwood menace and girlish, ice-rink naïveté. In this stripped-down setting, Mr. Kelly gave the accusatory refrain "Where have you been, my darling?/ Where have you been my friend?" a seafaring lilt.
Throwing themselves into the performance of the steel-guitar weeper "How to Kill a Bad Thing" her band achieved a miniature grandeur. But the highlight was "Willow Song," from the soundtrack of the 1973 film "The Wicker Man," which sounded like an attempt to cross Joni Mitchell's "Chelsea Morning" with the Velvet Underground's "Black Angel's Death Song." Playing the cello in anything shorter than a floor-length dress requires some expert leg positioning, and Ms. Campbell's bare knees and high-heeled cowboy boots added some ersatz prairie sass.
But while there is a pleasing continuity to her new batch of songs, they are not all that memorable. That fact was underscored by the relative power of the show-closing Vaselines stomper "Son of a Gun." Nonetheless, part of Ms. Campbell's charm is the suggestion of a grift, and the way that she likes to ride shotgun, as long as it's by her own design.
