Marianne Faithfull: Before The Poison

By GRAHAM REID

(Herald rating: * * * )

Faithfull has never been the most chipper of characters, but that's what Neil Young used to call "the needle and the damage done". With rare exceptions - notably that Broken English album which is now 25 years old - her life has always been more interesting than her albums, and her fearsome intellect has been daunting for interviewers who might dare suggest her career is something less than brilliant.

Brit author Will Self pens the almost impenetrable, literary hagiography for the cover here: "For decades now Marianne Faithfull has dragged this Sisyphean stylus up a groovy hill, and all you can do is lie there getting your liver gnawed for free." Quite.

And so another album. This time she dips into the cheerful songbooks of Polly Harvey and Nick Cave, or has them provide the music to her neo-miserablist lyrics which go something like this: "Hated by all and every where he goes, blazing contempt for human life" or "Only the rich make the laws using repression and force, whore of Babylon, city of quartz".

Even that once-cheery chap Damon Albarn gets the whiff of the misanthrope about him when he co-writes with her: "We saw the green fields turn into home, lonely homes".

Faithfull delivers these grim truths in that limited vocal range which is now pitched somewhere between Nico and Lili Von Shtupp.

Of course this is unfair because Faithfull is famously an interpreter, a habitue of that Weimar cabaret of the soul, a chanteuse of the chimeras and so on. But here the monochrome tones are elevated only by the variety of the arrangements which run from lovely, swelling Anglo-pop on Last Song (the one with Albarn) to stuttering and grinding Bowie-esque/Velvet Underground rock (Desperanto) and artful piano and strings on There is a Ghost. The final track with fake glockenspiel and old clocks is interesting.

Yes, there is an undeniable dark beauty at work but little here surprises; it simply mines the same narrow vein and a little of her tobacco-infused speak-sing vocals can go a long way.

Anyway, Marianne says in the liner notes she loved working with these people and had a lot of fun.

It sounds like it.

Label: Shock