I`m Not There

It’s amazing how the floodgates open when you shut out all the internal and external noise, stop pandering to stereotype, cease listening to your anxieties, and disregard the compartment society has built for you. I’m Not Your Man, the Charlie Andrew (Alt-J, Rae Morris)-produced second album from Marika Hackman, begins with an impromptu hearty laugh. It’s not the sound of silliness; it’s the sound of liberation, spontaneity, and joy. 24-year-old Hackman is feeling more herself than ever. Life isn’t necessarily funnier or happier, but when there’s cause for a joke or a big ballsy statement, she’s not holding back any more.

Jesse Kinch's "I'm Not Like Everybody Else" is the title cut from his full-length debut, due out 1 June via Curb Records. If Kinch's name is familiar, it's probably because of his appearance on ABC's Rising Star singing competition. There, he wowed audiences with covers of "I Put a Spell on You" and "Seven Nation Army", fusing the soul of rock's past with the bombast of its present.

Having found himself back in the commercial limelight with Gorgeous George, Collins followed it up with the equally – possibly even more – delightful I'm Not Following You. Trademark wit blended with passion intact and with key sideplayers drummer Paul Cook and bassist Clare Kenny helping out among many others – including a wonderfully scabrous vocal cameo by Mark E. Smith on the very disco "Seventies Night" – Collins tries all sorts of different things and more often than not comes up with the goods. "The Magic Piper (Of Love)" was the understandable lead single, catchy and with more than a little bite to it, drawing from finger-snapping hep-lounge Vegas sources and his own fun lyrics: "My girlfriend she got blotto/Half cut in Santa's grotto/It turns out he's a dirty old man." Add to that some just right flute and a clever brass sample that suddenly turns into an orchestrated sample from the Velvet Underground, and the man still has it. It's one of many joys throughout, with Collins showing a musical heterodoxy that would probably stupefy most other bands or acts.

This is the second recording by BIS of Sally Beamish’s music, and the four pieces it contains confirm utterly her high standing. Her work is thoughtfully lyrical, intense, individual, instinctively dramatic, in ways that remind me somewhat of Nicholas Mawmusic. Like him she has a particular gift for expressive harmony and timbre. The earliest piece here is No, I’m not afraid (1989), six poignant poems written from prison by Irina Ratushinskaya spoken – by Beamish herself – against sparse but hugely effective instrumental backgrounds and interspersed with five purely instrumental interludes. The disc opens with The Caledonian Road of 1997. The name of this piece refers not just to the north London thoroughfare remembered by Beamish from childhood but to her own pilgrimage northward to Scotland, where she now lives. The music resonates with a sense of ritual, of something inevitable. By contrast, the work that follows, the unabashedly poetic The Day Dawn (written for a summer school organised by Contemporary Music-making for Amateurs in 1997, and revised in 2000) derives from a Shetland fiddle tune, and is all about new beginnings.

Swamp Dogg never stopped working in the late '70s but after 1974's Have You Heard This Story??, his last stab at a major, he faded away, grinding out records on labels that were, at best, regionally known. Things changed in 1981 when Takoma – a roots label then owed by Chrysalis Records – decided to sign Dogg and fund the recording of I'm Not Selling Out – I'm Buying In!, an album that represented both an artistic comeback and something of a signal boost as well. It, like all the other Swamp Dogg records before it, did not sell but it did garner attention upon its release, and it stands as one of his best and better-known albums. Despite Dogg's proclamation in the liner notes that he produced this album "because I love Rock & Roll," there's not much three-chord boogie here: just "Wine, Women and Rock 'n' Roll," plus the cheeky revival "Total Destruction to Your Mind Once Again."

From their earliest days as a band, the members of R.E.M. always had a Keen sense of how they wanted to be perceived visually, even when it sometimes seemed as if they didn’t want to be seen at all…