Marc Almond ★★★★
I’m Not Anyone
BMG. CD/DL
Astute covers album celebrating 45 years of music-making.
MARC ALMOND has always had a way with a cover version, from Soft Cell’s gloriously offbeat takes on Tainted Love and What? to his tingling duet with Gene Pitney on Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart. On I’m Not Anyone, Almond’s 27th solo album, he’s in his element re-imagining 11 songs by such disparate acts as Blue Cheer and Mahalia Jackson, inhabiting and internalising each one of them; every hurt, every joy. A case in point, Marmalade’s Reflections Of My Life, which in his hands, sounds both epic and vulnerable, as if Scott Walker had recorded it originally. If you’re feeling sensitive, it might just tip you over the edge. And if that doesn’t, then the emotional drama he brings to Rita & The Tiaras’ Northern soul gem Gone With The Wind (Is My Love) most definitely will.