It's the self-portrait on the cover that gives the first hint that something's changed with Marilyn Manson. The eyes are blank, his face weary. No longer does the singer look like the Antichrist Superstar. He seems more like a middle-aged rocker in the midst of an identity crisis.

He says as much, too, on the title track. During the bridge section, Manson rasps "Am I a man or a show, or moment ?" What really strikes you, though, is not the existential questioning. It's the change of musical style.

The song's gently strummed chords usher in a strangely plaintive baritone. On the verse, Manson sounds like Nick Cave singing the tune from the Beatles' "Across the Universe", the doom-laden vocals contrasting with the wide-eyed chords. In the chorus, the mood shifts. The words "we are, sick, fucked up and complicated" are sung as a rousing anthem for the dispossessed.

And so it is throughout the album, with dark melodies and minor chords alternating with fist-pumping choruses. Manson's usual industrial elements are still there just dominated by Seventies and Eighties rock.

The new musical palette comes courtesy of producer (and country singer) Shooter Jennings, who wrote and arranged the music on the album. Jennings and Manson got together after bonding over their shared love of David Bowie. 

That love of the Thin White Duke is clear on "Don't Chase the Day", which echoes Bowie's later Eno period. The album's other influences are equally obvious. "Perfume" sounds like Depeche Mode at their most gothic. The album's prettiest song, "Paint You with My Love", is pure T-Rex, right down to the lyrics - "Honky-tonk devils glitter in/Like royal rats in kitten skin'. Manson's deep vocals add a hint of Bauhaus.

The result of all this genre-blending is an album that's more tuneful and affecting than anything else he's recorded. In interviews, the singer has intimated the reason for changing his soundscape was to press reset on his career. More likely, though, he'd just tired of playing the pantomime villain. After all, who is there left to shock? The most shocking thing on WE ARE CHAOS is the revelation that as a good old-fashioned goth, Manson is so darn entertaining.

• More new music reviews on theartsdesk

@russcoffey 

Overleaf: watch Marilyn Manson's video for "WE ARE CHAOS"

The standard recitation goes like this. In the early Seventies a London scene evolved, centring on bands playing in pubs. Music was taken back to the grassroots. Finesse was unnecessary. What happened was dubbed pub rock and it laid the ground for an even more basic style: punk rock. Pub rock fed into and helped foster punk rock.

Toots Hibbert may have invented the term “reggae” with his 1968 hit “Do the Reggay” but he has never felt boxed in by the genre. During his almost 60-year singing career, he may have recorded some of the greatest ska and reggae tunes of all time, from “Monkey Man” to “Pressure Drop” and “54-46, That’s My Number”, but has also dipped his toe into soul music and even tried his hand at a version of John Denver’s “Country Roads”.

Ammar 808, named after the 1980s Roland drum machine TR-808 is the vehicle for Tunisian producer Sofyann Ben Youssef. He has been exploring, notably in Maghreb United (2018), a rich vein of resonance between the music of North Africa and electronic technology.

If Doves have a “thing”, it’s that they do “big” with impeccable intimacy. Over ten years and four albums, they consistently displayed exactly the sort of connection that bands like Coldplay and Keane pretend to have. Huge, sweeping scores and broad emotional swells that feel like an old friend putting their arm around you and telling you you're not on your own.

Music has never been more important than in these dark, dislocating and death-stalked days, fear and grief visiting us in ways once unimaginable. The lack of live music – the lack even of the possibility of live music in the near future – is an absence keenly felt. However much we love to listen in the isolation of our own headphones, nothing can ever replace the communal concert event.

Seattle-born Allison Neale’s alto saxophone sound is instantly appealing. Her playing has the light wispy, airy quality from the "cool", "West Coast" school of Paul Desmond. One day last year, she spent just six hours (10am-5pm minus an hour for lunch, I gather) with three other top-flight jazz musicians at Angel Studios in Islington – shortly before it closed, in fact. The result, Quietly There (Ubuntu Music) is a completely delightful album.

In what would have been the year her father, the legendary sitar player Ravi Shankar turned 100, sitarist and composer Anoushka Shankar pays tribute to him and builds on his legacy in this online Prom. The pre-recorded first half saw Shankar collaborate with electronic producer, composer and performer Gold Panda for a half hour long continuous piece, Variations.

So far this year, Live at Goose Lake August 8th, 1970 is 2020’s most exciting archive release. The album is a previously unknown soundboard recording of The Stooges playing at Jackson, Michigan’s Goose Lake Festival. The event was formally billed as Goose Lake Park – International Music Festival. Also on were Faces, Ten Years After, The Flying Burrito Brothers and The James Gang.

Suzanne Vega sprang to fame 35 years ago, her eponymous debut one of the last albums we bought in vinyl before the advent of that new-fangled format of aluminium aspic. From it came “Marlene on the Wall”, the video an MTV hit. “Luka” and “Tom’s Diner”, from Solitude Standing, Vega’s second outing, cemented her reputation: drawn from real life, each were unusual chart successes – the first told from the point of view of an abused child, the second a cappella. Vega was the first woman to headline at Glastonbury.