New Waters song released by Marianne Faithfull

If anybody wakes up with "that dark brown taste" in their mouth it is surely Marianne Faithfull, whose cracked husk of a voice is a tribute to a lifetime of lighting up. Twenty years after the indispensable Broken English, Vagabond Ways features a set of songs that are, for the most part, perfectly tailored to Faithfull's wry, semi- detached delivery. Daniel Lanois's atmospheric soundscapes provide an ideal foil, most hauntingly on Marathon Kiss, though the folkish noodlings elsewhere expose the absence of more adventurous, less indulgent collaborators. The album's highlights are unexpected: Incarceration of a Flower Child is an unrecorded Roger Waters song from 1968 that is thick with his trademark paranoia; while For Wanting You, an Elton John-Bernie Taupin composition, reminds you what a telling songwriting team they could be. Something of a veterans' reunion, then, but none the worse for that.

thanks to Rupert Englander