Marianne Faithfull refuses to age gracefully. She wants you to hear the toll time has taken on her body in every note she croaks. “She walks the boulevard without a care / Knowing too much but having come so far,” she sings on “Crazy Love,” from her latest album, “Before the Poison” (Anti). “Pretending life is just a game you play for nothing / Loving no one and nowhere.” Her voice is a hollow rasp falling somewhere between a witch’s cackle and a death rattle.

She has certainly earned that rasp. Discovered by Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham as a schoolgirl in London, Faithfull was quickly thrust into a life of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. She spent the 1960s cavorting with Mick Jagger, the 1970s bottoming out on heroin, and the 1980s and 1990s recovering and reinventing her image. Her discography, which includes some 17-odd albums, runs the gamut from wispy folk to bitter blues to experimental art-pop.

Now 58, Faithfull is a certified cultural icon. She embodies the glamour of Swinging London as well as its dark side, but maintains the kind of bohemian cultural cachet that contemporaries like the Stones or Rod Stewart lost two decades ago. The punk and alt-rock generations worshiped her, and they helped cultivate the survivor persona she has maintained since her breakthrough 1979 album “Broken English.”

Like its predecessor, 2002’s “Kissin Time,” which featured Beck and Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins, “Before the Poison” unites Faithfull with younger musicians who are in awe of her history. Unfortunately, that awe prevents her collaborators from challenging either themselves or Faithfull, and the results are tediously predictable, for the most part.

British siren PJ Harvey, who contributes five tracks, backs Faithfull with raw garage-punk riffs and ragged rhythms that seem identical to those on Harvey’s lackluster 2004 album “Uh Huh Her.” (One tune, “No Child of Mine,” is, in fact, on both records.) “Crazy Love” and “There Is a Ghost,” two of Australian goth king Nick Cave’s three songs, are tailored for background ambience at a smoky after-hours club.

One listen to Faithfull’s mastery of that genre on 1987’s “Strange Weather,” however, puts these attempts to shame. Likewise, Cave’s “Desperanto” is a weak approximation of “Broken English’s” edgy new wave. Only Damon Albarn, of the Britpop band Blur, and film composer Jon Brion match Faithfull’s voice with something fresh. The dirgelike finality of Albarn’s “Last Song” is chilling, while Brion’s “City of Quartz” is a demonic waltz propelled by the chimes of a possessed music box.

The lyrics on “Before the Poison” are uniformly cringe-worthy. Faithfull, who wrote or co-wrote the words to seven of its ten tracks, seems to have no interest in coming across as anything other than a weather-beaten martyr willing to sacrifice everything for love. “When you’re not in my sight / Then everything just fades from view,” she moans on “The Mystery of Love.” “Now all my love is out / It’s just for you,” goes “Last Song.” “Oh my lover / Never was there another,” is the refrain of “There Is a Ghost.” And on and on it goes. Her performance is certainly believable – that voice is pure misery. But misery alone can’t carry an album, and neither can history.