Arista

Annie Lennox is the female counterpart of Peter Gabriel—she has an explosive solo career spawned from an important band, but crafts albums so slowly and deliberately the next one seems it will never arrive, and when it does, it sounds familiar while still somehow riding the bleeding edge of coming musical trends. For example, an unmistakable zydeco flair opens “Ghosts In My Machine,” and you can place bets now that zydeco will be the next hot thing, but the instrumentation is still synth-based, with a return to the layered vocals of Diva after going raw with Bare. (There’s a chapter in a music history textbook someday about the reliance on overdubbing by the signature voices of the 1980s.) As the album title suggests, there’s some strident political commentary involved, though Lennox is too savvy to resort to the Neil-Young-ish “Bush is a dick” whining that constitutes the sad state of modern protest music, preferring instead to deliver proactive messages, enlisting for the woman-power track “Sing” a backup group of Madonna, Sarah McLachlan, Dido, Celine Dion, KT Tunstall, Pink, Shakira, k.d. lang, Fergie and a dozen other random superstars, including, probably, your mom. She still handles her business with a great deal of soul, having absorbed the blues better than any other white British woman on record (well, except for Elton John).

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