Not many musicians claim that their new album is most influenced by artist and Alien designer HR Giger, but only one musician is Martin Grech and his second album Unholy doesn't sound like much else you'll find in music shops. He first made his name with Open Heart Zoo, a glacial slice of Radiohead-style melody that appeared in a car advert three years ago.

However, anyone who went and bought the album of the same name expecting more chilled-out but still intelligent songs would have been a little surprised by its much darker and occasionally very noisy contents.

There was still great depth and beauty in there though, it just needed a bit more conscientious searching to draw it out. Meanwhile, the likes of Royksopp and Sigur Ros were offering whole albums full of Open Heart Zoo style chill-out, and Grech kind of disappeared.

Now he is back with an album that will confuse nobody as it is exactly what we would expect, particularly those who have heard lead single Guiltless, which is as far from chill-out as you can get. Apparently, Grech wrote the words 'Holy', 'Sensual' and 'Debauched' all over his studio walls while recording Unholy, to sum up the three emotions he had decided were running through the music.

If that sounds a little pretentious, bear with him, as he is working to a higher agenda than most of his contemporaries: "I'm doing it because it's what I want to do - it's from the heart. All musicians are interested in these days is being cool. It's so boring - celebrities do that, you don't need musicians to do that as well," he said.

While Guiltless is a little difficult to take in at first listen - perhaps not the best choice for a single then - Venus is a lovely dark folk song with hints of Jeff Buckley in Grech's voice. Erosion and Regeneration sounds a bit more like a Geography lecture than a song title, and it doesn't even really sound like a song either, but it's atmospheric as hell.

And I do mean 'hell', as this is a very dark and sinister album, much like the art by HR Giger that supposedly inspired it. I Am Chromosone finds him in full-on Nine Inch Nails-esque industrial metal mode, very far removed from the low-key songs that have preceeded it, and the album as a whole (for it must be listened to as a whole) features all kinds of different, but always dark and moody, styles.

This isn't an album that will sound good whilst lying on a beach in Ibiza this summer, but if you want something just a little bit deeper and with some real substance, then you have to give Martin Grech a go. Music doesnt always have to be three-minute pop songs about holding hands, and Unholy is about as far from that and as close to 'art' as a CD gets.