Marianne Faithfull possesses a voice made out of Blue Velvet; cracked and compelling in its evocation of ruined innocence.

This wayward aristocrat has had a reckless career; in the last two years alone Faithfull's gone from fronting Brecht and Weill's The Seven Deadly Sins to gracing Metallica's 'The Memory Remains' with the kind of performance she could moan in her sleep. So, Vagabond Ways constitutes her first mainstream work since the telegraph from the Weimar Republic that was 20th Century Blues in 1996. The material is sourced from a cast as disparate as Roger Waters (the 1968 vintage 'Incarceration Of A Flower Child'), Leonard Cohen, Bernie Taupin/Elton John and a slew of new tunes co-written with longtime collaborator Barry Reynolds, playwright Frank McGuinness and Daniel Lanois.

Vagabond Ways, it transpires is a stormy but bountiful marriage of tailor-cut songs and majestic production that never embarrasses by attempting to incorporate fashionable techniques, yet still manages to warp this roots music into something quite alien and visionary. Consider the mind-blowing guitar in the fade-out of 'Wilder Shores Of Love', or the chemical ecstasy of Lanois' 'Marathon Kiss' ("What's it all for if you can't live the moment?"), and marvel.

But if the tone is predominantly meditative, there are delicious moments where Marianne bares her teeth, such as on the title tune, a comment on the covert sterilisation of 'undesirables' in Sweden in the '70s. Or Bernie Taupin uncharacteristically exchanging soap for strychnine in the barbed lyric of 'For Wanting You'. And the Waters tune is prime Pink Floyd paranoia, all death-of-the-'60s druggy hee-bee-gee-bees, as cold as a state institution, Meddle played by Prince's Revolution in 3/4 time.

'Electra' meanwhile, is a ruthless self-portrait of Snow White having aged and become her own wicked stepmother, staring in the mirror and failing to recognise the image. And then the vocalist goes and pulls off the near impossible by making Leonard's 'Tower Of Song' her own. Now, Cohen's caustic verses are sharp enough to eat any half-hearted interpreter alive (there's not many could deliver his "I was born with the gift of a golden voice" with the right amount of deadpan), but Faithfull effortlessly makes the lyric work to tell her own tale. This, and 'After The Ceasefire' constitute a fitting climax to an album that manages to veer between the desolate and the fertile, a collection of torch songs for the lunar landscape.

Vagabond Ways is too cruel, scarred and close-to-the-bone to have been made by anyone but a survivor. Here's a work to rival Broken English.