Sing, Memory is released on the ServiceAv label that Banbury runs with former Art of Noise member, talking head and all-round art pop aristo Paul Morley, both of whom have previously worked with Nixey in the sublime Infantjoy, and it's to this group more than the better known Luke Haines side project Black Box Recorder (for whom she also provided vocals) that Sing, Memory owes its largest debt.

In between triphop beats, artpop electronics and disco drum lines you'll still find lyrics about double whiskeys, concrete jungles and children crying on the radio of course. She's not going to let you get off that easily. Nightshift in particular is this album's Child Psychology, a song as fragile and beautiful as it is disturbing but Nixey has taken the original, recorded by Peel favourites The Names, and made it her own.

From the spoken word intro of Sing (prelude), Nixey sets out her stall, explaining that there are two sides to everything: some songs are true and others are lies. What follows is an album in two halves, a package that in the good old days of vinyl would have been spread over two lovely large discs of delicate black vinyl to slip in and out of a beautifully designed gatefold, to nurture and caress. It's difficult to think of Nixey without images of a perfect, bohemian utopia bubbling to the surface. We slip even further into the night from Memory (prelude) onwards, another spoken word intro that segues into The Collector, the album's standout single.

The woman will always have a special place in this reviewer's heart for bringing melodious life to the line "Life is unfair/Kill yourself or get over it", thereby rubbishing Morrissey's entire career in just nine words and proving her utter superiority to all other forms of pop life but nonetheless it's good to see that she can cut the mustard without Haines' idiosyncratic (read: disturbingly bonkers) lyrics to back her up. At times disposable MTV disco - single Strangelove to name but one - and at others music for a trashed BoHo lounge at 4am - Masquerade deserves special mention - Sing, Memory is as listenable as it is addictively seductive, the perfect soundtrack for when the curtains are drawn and the sheets are made of black satin.

It's a record that beckons you in with an evil grin to slip beneath its eighties electro surface into the same dark and murky waters where Echo and the Bunnymen and OMD first invited us to skinny dip. Echoes of the darker end of eighties electronica flit all over the album, above and beyond the cover of the early Human League classic The Black Hit Of Space, slipping in and out of ethereal memories from the British Electric Foundation to Saint Etienne.

On 13 February Nixey is playing the St Valentine's Day Massacre at the Luminaire - a venue that could prove to be the ultimate date. Marry the boy who offers to take you there and you won't go far wrong. Unless he murders you on the wedding night of course, which would make a great subject for a Sarah Nixey song. Let's hope she's working on the next album already.

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Mercury Prize 2009 nominees