With his first record in more than half a decade, the godfather of darkwave once again cuts through the skin to tell the dark tale of an anguished heart. Jagged is the highway to a hellish reality reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno, where the narrator, suffering from a moral crisis (alternately religious or relationship-based), yearns for salvation. Numan’s characteristic coupling of cool synths and wailing vocals still manages to evoke great emotion on cuts like the beat-driven “Haunted” — where he channels his inner Frankenstein to cry I want to bleed/And I can hardly breathe — or the howling “Halo,” where a careless God and unfaithful lover are one, setting the stage for one of the finest lines in recent times: Does God bleed on your white halo? While the more optimistic “Scanner” shows a momentary turn toward faith, the album-closing title track paints a piercing portrait of a fallen individual who now embodies the world’s horrors as the demon resurrection, demonstrating Numan’s refusal to neatly wrap his tale together in a heart-shaped box.
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