Patrick Wolf certainly has his drooling admirers; not a glowering, baleful eye is cast on this 20-year-old on the first three pages of a Google search for his name. It's easy to see why. For one, the encumbering folklore that drags heavy about Wolf's skinny shoulders is intriguing in all the right ways: He casts himself as a neo-Dickensian laptop minstrel, a wandering electro-folk organ grinder, and a pacifist werewolf bent on a nomadic musical existence. Whether or not you buy into his mythology, though, his debut album confirms better reasons to check his music, not least of which is that the stockpile of personal issues he doles out here contains enough agony and energy to fuel the fires of several puberties.

When Fat Cat Records discovered him four years ago, and saw fit to kit him out with his own mini-studio, he was just 16, but had already chalked up ten years of musicianship. He toured Europe with an orchestra, before going on to form the now-defunct punk band Maison Crimineaux in Paris. (The alias "Patrick Wolf" was conceived there shortly thereafter, with the assistance of a local clairvoyant.) And this impressive background has paid off with Lycanthropy, on which he wraps his folk-pop musings in lush blankets of violin, viola, harp and harpsichord, and tricks out the mix with aggressive electronic textures. His singing voice is fantastic as well, with a broad British accent recalling the caustic androgyny of Suede's Brett Anderson.

Late British author Angela Carter played a formative role in Wolf's thematic development; her novel, The Brotherhood of the Wolf, inspired his lycanthropy obsession. Carter based much of her work on themes of adolescence embodied in erotic folklore metaphor, and here, Wolf occasionally paraphrases or condenses some of her passages in lyrics like, "I was once a boy/ Until I cut my penis off/ And grew a hairy scar of stubborn fire." But if his transformation from boy to wolf is complete, he's still marked by a mortal vulnerability-- a result of an unsettled childhood of bullying and rejection.

"A Boy Like Me" is a perfectly sculpted pop song for the ubiquitous dissolute youth: "A boy like me is told he is both nine and ninety/ And a boy like me should shut those books and join the army." Alienation and teen misery are not rare commodities in music, but Wolf throws up such provocative contrasts ("I want total chaos/ And a holiday home in the east") that his naivete often seems acknowledged-- possibly even a put-on-- just another undercurrent in the clever, serpentine narratives that guide us through this densely self-aware work.

When Wolf brings his considerable sequencing skills to the forefront, Lycanthropy echoes Warp Records prodigy Chris Clark's raw and uncompromising 2000 release Clarence Park. But then, Wolf's influences are so numerous that if occasional snatches of Clark or Nick Cave or Joni Mitchell are briefly detected, they quickly give way to fusions of other artists, or combine to create a sound of their own. Meanwhile, the music itself is polarized and raw, with (naturally) lycanthropic juxtapositions of rustic/urban, ordered/chaotic, naive/cynical.

It may be tempting for some to judge Wolf in terms of his age, but this would be doing a disservice to a lyricist of such courage. If any complaint could be lodged against Lycanthropy, it's that it sometimes lacks subtlety, as it's possessed by a heady, pubescent intoxication that can result in some indiscriminate vocalizing. Still, witnessing such breathless unraveling of the heart and such thoughtless conviction that never quite sounds arrogant is exhilarating-- not to mention rare. Indeed, with Lycanthropy, Wolf has constructed a themed record that deftly manipulates myths while brazenly striding into new, tumultuous territory. On the eve of his virgin U.S. tour this May, it would seem he has more in common with the Pied Piper than with Peter Pan, and his eerie playing will surely seduce many into his following.