EVEN AFTER ELEVEN ALBUMS, including two this year, Hawskley Workman remains one of Canada’s most underrated musicians. As anyone who has seen him live can attest, he’s a thoroughly original performer, each touring show featuring new stage antics and fresh banter. Establishing, regardless of the venue, a comfortable rapport with his audience, Workman suggests being an artist is superfluous: if he could, he would do it for pure love of music and his fans.

His second release this year, Los Manlicious finds Workman bringing a deeply carnal whiff back into his music. He makes Justin Timberlake seem like a timid schoolyard boy, kissing girls in the bushes for the very first time. Los Manlicious can be considered both a departure and a return to form: firstly, it is unlike both Treeful of Starling (2006) that introspective, quiet and bare album that featured Workman plumbing the depths of his emotions, and Between the Beautifuls (2008), which featured sweet melodic pop celebrating nature and feeling alive.

Los Manlicious is a dirty, distorted, grinding piece of cabaret pop – the very kind of sexy and naughty that memorable nights are made of. In this sense, the album harkens back to the sultriest of Workman’s compositions, recalling such sensuous numbers as “Tarantulove,” “Striptease,” and “Jealous of Your Cigarette.” The album is rife with entendres, double or not, that slide in smoothly between distorted guitars that almost flick the sweat off his body as he wraps his vocals around the microphone seductively.

Roger Waters once expressed dismay that people found Dark Side of the Moon merely an album for shagging. There is little doubt that Workman would revel in the compliment. There is a certain ecstasy to his latest batch of songs which his fans will readily recognize; the lucky ones who are experiencing it for the first time will scarcely know what to do with such unrepentant pleasure, even on the darkest tracks.

From the muddy opening chords of “When You Gonna Flower?” – a song that is not about flowers – to the album’s closer, “Fatty Wants to Dance,” a quasi-electronic, Euro-dance song of joy that is strangely not out of place in a cabaret list, the album barely contains Workman’s enthusiasm for life. His enthusiasm for life may be a thinly veiled enthusiasm for the darkness of death, for the darkness behind every sexual encounter, behind every petite mort. There is no hiding in Workman’s music, unless it is part of the fetish, in which case, to hide is to further the game. The only thing this album requires besides the ability to sleep in the next morning is a trampled pack of cigarettes to share afterwards.