Before violinist Sarah Martin began her palatable foray into singer/songwriting on Belle & Sebastian's awful Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk like a Peasant, Isobel Campbell was the lone female voice of the Scottish folk group. Boasting a small array of fey mumbles, her sappy, wide-eyed delivery worked best when complementing frontman Stuart Murdoch's own saccharine pipes.

After marring both The Boy with the Arab Strap and the This is a Modern Rock Song EP with her lackluster songs and vocals, she released The Green Fields of Foreverland in 1999 under the moniker the Gentle Waves, a band essentially comprised of Campbell in the forefront will some Belle & Sebastian members backing.

It was terrible. Abysmal. Unforgettably and unforgivably disgusting. It was everything bad about Belle & Sebastian multiplied by a thousand and filtered through Campbell. If anyone had cared, it might have gone down in history as containing the worst song of 1999, Campbell's ode to the forest, "Tree Lullaby."

It seems, though, that Campbell's on the upswing with the release of the Gentle Waves' second full-length, Swansong for You. By that I simply mean that the record is listenable. After a triumphant turn with Peasant's "Family Tree," Campbell seems to be gaining some much needed direction Or maybe Belle & Sebastian is getting so bad that Campbell's improvement seems great in comparison to the uniform plunge the other members have taken.

No matter which, Swansong finds Campbell branching out and dabbling with genres other than the quiet, solo-acoustic chamber-folk of Foreverland. Sure, everything on Swansong is derivative, but that's the point. Innovation coming from any member of Belle & Sebastian would be entirely too shocking; it could incite twee riots. Imagine-- the breaking of thousands of pairs of horn-rimmed glasses; weak-armed attempts to loot stores of Felt 45s; the streets flooded with the scrawny and pale, biting and pulling hair.

So, it comes as no surprise that Swansong's "Pretty Things" mimics light, acoustic bossanova, or that "Flood" evokes '50s golden rock a la the Penguins' "Earth Angel." What is surprising is how musically tight the album is, and the lush, full feel of the giant string sections. The sound isn't as layered as that on any of Belle & Sebastian's albums, but it's certainly getting there.

"Sisterwoman" is a mod-sounding dance number that reveals Campbell's major flaw as a vocalist: her complete lack of soul. Time and again, it's her voice that bogs the album down and prevents it from truly reaching acceptability. Her cloying whines coupled with her maddeningly trite lyrics makes the Gentle Waves ultimately laughable. She's so consistently sweet, so self-consciously adorable that she annoys from the onset.

And the irritation never wanes. On the otherwise dreamy, Mamas and the Papas-influenced closer, "There Was Magic, Then," Campbell is at her lyrical worst: "When I was a little girl, I dreamt of dancing/ I dreamt of many things the heart could hold/ I'd nurse my doll, would love and care for him/ Would breathe life into him/ For I believed/ The world was grand with many precious things/ Fine air, such precious things..."

To Campbell's merit, though, there's a noticeable lack of pretension on Swansong for You. She's bereft of any insight, but through her lyrics and most certainly her voice, she doesn't claim to be anything more than a girl with a guitar and some recycled ideas. Still, she simply doesn't have enough ideas-- or even enough of a voice-- to sustain a complete album as frontwoman.

-Richard M. Juzwiak