“Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine,” Patti Smith once spat, and surely a young Thalia Zedek found meaning in Smith’s strongly symbolic anti-sentiment. The former Uzi, Live Skull and Come frontwoman has spent the last three decades fashioning found art from the broken glass of interpersonal turbulence: weathering heroin addiction, joblessness and destitution while creating a catalog that consistently mines an unholy form of the blues, the kind more familiar to Nick Cave fans than those who swear allegiance to Robert Johnson’s swampy Delta variety. Liars And Prayers (its title a nod to Zedek’s view of the cast of characters of the Bush administration) is the sort of “Rimbaud does Cannery Row” gutter poetry in E minor that she and her peers—Mark Lanegan, Richard Buckner, Carla Bozulich, et al—do so compellingly. It’s Zedek’s latter-day masterwork, and while there’s hardly a weak track in the bunch, the album’s centerpiece, “Body Memory,” forms the emotional core of the album. The dangerously personal song takes stock of Zedek’s vast closetful of mistakes and regrets, her cigarette-encrusted voice pleading for release from her “trapped and tripping” mental state while uncoiled, feedback-stained guitar figures dance like cobras around the melody. The balance of the album tackles her usual array of demons (depression, drug-induced paranoia, death) but places them in decidedly more political settings than usual, taking her two-presidential-term reservoir of anger and turning it outward, much like her heroine Patti once did, back when Horses set the standard for what it meant to be the most dangerous rock chick around. That torch has now passed to Zedek, and she uses it here to burn the shithouse right down to the ground. [Thrill Jockey, www.thrilljockey.com]

—Corey duBrowa