Thirty years into his erratic but perennially spirited career, Marc Almond has become Britain's most endearing musical drama queen. Varieté, his first album of self-penned new material in a decade — and thus the first since his near-fatal 2004 motorcycle accident — is hyperventilating, overwrought business as usual. Almond's conceptual fixations and lyrical concerns have not altered since his days in early-'80s synth-pop pioneers Soft Cell, and are all present and correct here: the loneliness of the long-distance performer ("Cabaret Star"); the sad tears behind the glittering smile ("The Trials of Eyeliner"); the irresistible pull of the deviant, transgressive life ("Sin Song"). It's still all torments and toreros around here. Yet while the subject matter may sound cosily, even lazily familiar, Varieté works because Almond tackles his reliably torrid tales with magnificent vim and gusto. Amidst the trademark baroque, vaudeville arrangements, his passionate vocal pulls on the heartstrings with practised ease on melodramatic leadoff single "Nijinsky Heart" and the tremulous autobiographical piano-driven ballad "Lavender," while even Liza Minnelli might feasibly reject breathy tortured-artist lament "The Exhibitionist" as overly histrionic. Almond has suggested this could be his last album, a theme he teasingly revisits on "Swan Song" ("My time… read more »