Well we're certainly excited. Right after this weekend has come and gone, a panel of 'professionals' who are 'esteemed' in the 'music' 'business' will get together and choose the winner of the 2006 Mercury Music Prize.

As always, there are 12 albums on the Mercury Music Prize shortlist this year and, as always, quite a lot of them are rubbish. Fingers crossed, though, we've got the rubbish albums out of the way and we're deeply into the realm of music so good that it makes us sob a little inside. Well, OK, some of the albums are pretty half-decent. Kind of. And today's Mercury Music Prize album is nothing of not deeply weird.

Here are the Mercury Music Prize betting odds for Ballad Of The Broken Seas by Isobel Cambell & Mark Lanegan…

Isobel Cambell & Mark Lanegan: Ballad Of The Broken Seas – This is an odd mixture, since Isobel Cambell is probably the only woman in the world to be deemed 'too twee' by Belle And Sebastian, while Mark Lanegan is probably the only man in the world to be deemed 'too intense' by Queens Of The Stone Age. However, when they come together as they do on Ballad Of The Broken Seas, the effect is spine-tingling. For some reason, Isobel Cambell and Mark Lanegan manage to cancel out each other's most annoying aspects – Lanegan sounds honeyed and warm instead of terrifying and Cambell sounds like fully sexualised vixen instead of a hairclipped little girl. It works, too – think of Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood updated for these terribly modern times. Is it good? Yeah, it's OK – though how quickly Ballad Of The Broken Seas by Isobel Cambell & Mark Lanegan loses its charm when exposed to repeated listens has yet to be discovered. Will it win the Mercury Music Prize? There are a few albums on the shortlist that sound a lot like Ballad Of The Broken Seas, so we'd expect that whatever votes it would get will be diluted. Current Mercury Music Prize betting odds – 10/1 

Now buy Ballad Of The Broken Seas by Isobel Cambell & Mark Lanegan at Amazon

On Monday – The Mercury Music Prize betting odds for Cole's Corner by Richard Hawley

[story by Stuart Heritage]