It might be tempting to describe Marika Hackman’s I’m Not Your Man as a reinvention. After all, gone are the acoustic guitars that dominated her last record, We Slept At Last, swapped out for crushing grunge riffs and bobbing bass work.
Yet on closer examination, I’m Not Your Man is less of a 180 than one might assume. Hackman’s songwriting is still strikingly intelligent – she easily avoids the temptation of low-hanging emotional fruit, her tunes instead blurring feelings and themes. Scorching lead single ‘Boyfriend’ does a thousand things at once, crashing through tragedy to triumph and then all the way back again, while the excellent ‘My Lover Cindy’ somehow makes defeat feel like deliverance – and vice versa.
Nor has Hackman sacrificed her eerie, Shirley Jackson-esque leanings: ‘Gina’s World’ and ‘Violet’ are doused in the gentlest kind of terror. These are songs that speak of the great, agonising uncertainty of being; the kind of petty shittiness that we’re so accustomed to we can barely even acknowledge.
Not that this is some funeral dirge either. No. I’m Not Your Man is, above all else, a jubilant celebration of a songwriter at the very height of their talents. There’s no doubt that it is Hackman’s finest work. But time might also reveal it as the record of the year to boot.
Marika Hackman’s I’m Not Your Man is out now through AMF/Caroline.
