Michael Jackson's back from the dead. Again.

Pop humpty-dumpty Michael Jackson has a new album out today. If that statement seems odd, you don’t know the half of it; five years after his death, Jackson is only on album number two. Compared to a trooper like Tupac – who still manages a couple of albums per year, despite having copped it in 1996 – his posthumous output is actually pretty sluggish.

Record labels have always had a talent for cashing in on their dead charges. The zombie discs that result are generally made up of songs the ‘artist’ was too embarrassed to release when he recorded them. Michael Jackson’s new one, Xscape goes one further. It’s a cut ‘n’ paste job of unused demos and vocal off-cuts remixed by some producers who were quite cool circa 2002. It’s thus hard to approach it without thinking of that Spitting Image sketch where Konstantin Chernenko’s corpse is made to lip-synch a public address.