Give My Love to London

On perhaps her most potent record since 1979's raw Broken English, rock survivor Marianne Faithfull declaims like a dystopian queen of England, surveying a damaged empire with a cold eye and a magnificently wracked but indomitable voice. She draws excellence from star collaborators: Steve Earle co-wrote the withering title track; Roger Waters supplied the anthemic "Sparrows Will Sing"; Nick Cave contributed a dazzling junkie reverie, "Late Victorian Holocaust." The standard "I Get Along Without You Very Well" sounds delivered from the afterworld by a woman who's seen too much but will not look away.