With their frenetic art-rock compared to the best of Jane's Addiction, and their singer Katie Jane Garside described as "Kate Bush on crack", Queen Adreena have been hailed as one of the most exciting British bands in years. And Drink Me--its Lewis Carroll-inspired title promising strangeness and danger--is indeed a turbulent and thrilling affair. With Garside and guitarist Crispin Gray formerly collaborators in Daisy Chainsaw, you'd expect to hear pop of the most manic variety. But Drink Me steps far beyond the affected dementia of the likes of "Love Your Money".

It's really Garside who raises the stakes. Like a latter-day Nina Hagen, her voice slips between the lucid and the lost. "Kitty Collar Tight" sees her echo the rhythmic ranting of Mark E Smith. The closing "For I Am the Way" has her as clear and tiny as Stina Nordenstam, while during "Razorblade Sky" she's sexy-cute then suddenly mighty, like Catatonia's Cerys Matthews. And she freaks out--Man, does she freak out. Yet, whether or not Garside is wildly spiralling up or down, the band still back her with vigour and imagination. Sometimes content to simply provide pulsing rhythms or quietly bleak atmospherics, more often they kick up a filthy grunge-metal racket. High-minded and visceral, Drink Me is a disturbing joy. --Dominic Wills