on Earth We're Gorgeous

Concept albums are nothing new, but it’s the lengths to which Lights takes her fourth album Skin & Earth that sets it apart. After introducing herself as the comic book alter-ego Captain Lights in 2008, the electro-pop artist (real name: Valerie Poxleitner) further colors outside the lines by pairing her next LP, due this fall, with a comic book series from Dynamite Entertainment that brings the music’s narrative to life. “I’ve always found a way to connect comics and music, but never so directly,” she says.

Opening with Mike Hugg's title track, which builds on Mick Rogers' intense riffing and the killer vocals of Vicki Brown, Judith Powell, Liza Strike, and Ruby James, Messin' is pretty intense and involving from its very first bars. It's also damned topical and serious, for all of the free-wheeling rock & roll spirits and the progressive rock complexities that go into the playing. And the result is a spellbinding whole, featuring some astonishing keyboard flourishes by Manfred Mann himself (who ventures into Rick Wakeman and Keith Emerson territory on "Buddah," even as the rest of the band seems to be emulating Deep Purple) and killer guitar from Mick Rogers, while Colin Pattenden and Chris Slade lay down the rhythm section like a pair of articulate pile-drivers.

Described by critics as melodramatic and bombastic, the Mission, as they were known in their native U.K. (their name had to be changed in America owing to a Philadelphia R&B band with the same moniker), nonetheless attracted a core audience of goth rock fans…