Two of the four songs will seem familiar enough to anyone who has heard Mary Lou's first EP. She did a busker's rendition of Bevis Frond leader Nick Saloman's "He'd Be a Diamond" there, and does his lilting "Book" here; the EP had Jimmy Bruno's "I'm Talking to You", this disc has his jittery "On the Avenue". These are pleasant enough, but the other two songs are the ones that monopolize my attention. I haven't heard the original of "Ontario, Quebec and Me", and when I put the disc on the first time I didn't notice that the songwriters' names are only printed on the CD face, not the sleeve, but the phrasing of "We'll dance in the town 'til the sun comes up, / And push our beds together", at the end of the chorus, is unmistakably Billy Bragg's, and in fact the song turns out to be a Don't Try This at Home-era Bragg b-side. Bragg doesn't get covered that often, and this slow, breathy, halting interpretation, Lord's tapping foot distinctly audible as she attempts, only partially successfully, to keep the rhythm, is nearly the polar opposite of the only other Bragg cover by a woman I can think of offhand, Kirsty MacColl's hilarious bubblegum-pop translation of "A New England".

Richard Thompson, on the other hand, is probably the writer whose songs I own the most covers of, and since I own no Dylan or Beatles records, certainly the writer whose covered songs I'm most familiar with in their original guises, as well. Of my two favorite Thompson songs, "From Galway to Graceland" received what I consider to be the definitive alternate treatment on the tribute album The World Is a Wonderful Place, where Plainsong rearranged it for four-part a cappella. Mary Lou takes on my other favorite, Rumour and Sigh's "1952 Vincent Black Lightning". Her version endears itself to me even before she starts singing. Thompson is one of the world's most proficient guitarists, and Lord, though she's extremely practiced at accompanying herself, is not; rather than attempt to bluster over this problem, though, she opens the song with three determined passes at the song's twinkling central hook. No gasp of relief is literally audible after the third one, when she relaxes and lets the song ebb back into manageable strumming, but the feeling is palpable. "That song", she seems to be saying, and having made her point, settles down to concentrate on singing it.

And it's her singing of this song that renders me unable, so far, to concentrate on her album. It's certainly not that unusual to hear a woman sing a male songwriter's song, but I've only heard a few where it seems to me that the song's soul has been fundamentally altered by that detail, changed much more deeply than a superficial gender frisson. Kate Bush's lush synthesizer remake of Elton John's "Candle in the Wind" is like that, for me, a star-struck posthumous fan-letter transformed into a friend's consoling eulogy. Thompson's own version of "1952 Vincent Black Lightning", though it's one of his more unabashedly pretty songs of recent years, still seethes with caustic vitriol. In his hands, for me, this is a song about the terrifying shallowness of James Adie's life. When Richard sings "Red hair and black leather, my favourite colour scheme", I take James to be leering at Molly, mocking the entire concept of color schemes as being pointless for anything other than sexual preferences, and by extension dismissing the whole spectrum of life styles in which color schemes might figure in any other way. He downplays the ring he gives her, preempting "'Til death do us part" by predicting his own imminent demise. Handing her his keys, as he completes the self-fulfilling prophecy, is intended to be a poignant gesture, passing on the one thing he truly loves in the world, but it sickens me that a life could cling to nothing more substantial than a motorcycle and a trophy girlfriend. Little is actually said about Molly in the song (her entire script reads "That's a fine motorbike; / A girl could feel special on any such like"), but Thompson lets us assume the worst. Lord's voice, frail and earnest, changes everything for me. She delivers Molly's greeting with such precise elocution that the rhyme in it seems like the character's, not the writer's, and the line becomes a cute challenge, not an uneducated come-on. The setting, "corners and cafés", in Thompson's weary sneer are the dingy haunts of bikers and whores, but in Lord's clear indie-pop whisper could be coffee shops and commuter bus-stops, and the Vincent could, except for the logistical problem of getting two people on it at once, be a skateboard. The color-scheme line, delivered with a trace of self-conscious embarrassment, could be an art-school allusion, and the offhand explanation of the ring seems less like a defiance of social convention than a product of the inevitable post-modern confusion about whether that's how relationships are still supposed to be advanced or not. James' deathbed speech, which in the original seems to me to outline the boundaries of a distressingly claustrophobic universe of possibility, in Lord's version seems like a desperate attempt to block out the very dizzying profusion of alternatives that Richard's narrator seems oblivious to. Like the subject of Suicidal Tendencies' "Institutionalized" screaming that all he wants is a Pepsi, Lord's James reduces the world to a motorcycle and a redhead in the desperate hope that if he can cope with that small part of it, first, perhaps the cliff can be scaled one small foothold at a time. And although now I realize I'm stretching, and my Gen-X day-job characters have inexplicably become teenagers, if I hold my head at the right angle I can almost imagine that James is not killed by a shotgun blast incurred during an attempted armed robbery, he's dying, slowly, over the course of an interminable summer, from some gradual incurable disease whose lack of emotional drama is almost as debilitating as its physiological effects. Molly, his childhood best friend, and now first love, sits with him, and to fill the hours between the futile rituals of his treatment, and block out the blank, impassive walls of his hospital room, they invent a make-believe world for themselves, of which the robbery is part, and surround his bed with its scenery. The characters of its epic mythology, perhaps due to a few too many obsessive re-watchings of Heavenly Creatures, sever the heads of passing nurses, sweep the trays of tasteless institutional food aside with derisive swipes of their halberds, and kneel reverently at the foot of his bed, awaiting their commissions. And when the disease finally claims him in the real world, and the shotgun blast leads the thread of his dream life, too, to a hospital bed, the convergence turns denial into a method of understanding, and a form of acceptance. And thus, if we can suspend our disbelief at just the correct level for long enough, the thing he hands her as he dies might be not the keys to an oily, clattering motorcycle she will drive back, alone, to the same hunting grounds where she found him, the bait for her next conquest, but the keys to the imaginary and undying kingdom they have fabricated together, the strength of their love transcending the weakness of his frame, and the obtuse literalness of time.

Sleeper's early singles were where I first noticed this phenomenon. Swallow, Inbetweener and Vegas came in trayless, folding cardboard cases, like miniature gate-fold album sleeves, that I had not encountered before, and while their lack of structural support is probably why I haven't encountered many of them since, either, the very fragility of the package was part of its charm. There are clear pragmatic advantages to jewel cases, which can be used as coasters, door-stops, mid-air moth-swatters, etc., but a part of me misses the way a love for music was manifested, physically, in the careful handling of vinyl 45s in their flimsy paper sleeves. My experience of oddly-packaged CDs begins when I take one off the shelf, not when the first notes actually reach the speakers. This first stage of the experience isn't always good (I'd like to throttle the people responsible for Son Volt's album Straightaways, whose CD is nearly inextricable, and their EP Switchback, whose disc I have inadvertently flung out of the sleeve more than once), but at least it's distinctive. The two singles for "Romeo Me" are thus bad packaging and good at once. After a series of jewel-cased Sleeper singles, these are cardboard gatefolds again, and I find the combination of the material, the blurry cover photograph and the elegant typography extremely appealing. At the same time, the pocket into which the bottom half of the CD slips, in this part-one (a stratagem I first saw in Joni Mitchell's Hits and Misses), possesses the tragic flaw that when you hold it upside down, the disc falls out. Part two solves that problem by turning the two flaps of the gatefold into pockets that open into its inner spine, but this means that to get the disc out you have to execute a Freemason-like hand contortion that holds the empty flap at a 270-degree angle while you simultaneously squeeze the edges of the flap with the disc in it so that it will pucker open and the disc will drop out into your waiting (third) hand.

It's possible that I could contentedly take these discs out and put them back in again, griping happily, for some time, like Eeyore reveling in the possibilities of his deflated balloon and his empty honey jar, but it turns out there's music on them, too. Part one, in addition to the bleary, expansive title track, adds two new songs and a remake. "This Is the Sound of Someone Else", the first new one, is a choppy, menacing stomp, with low, gruff, buzzing guitar and languid synthesizer drones, Louise Wener's voice hissing as it spins through the flanger. "What Do I Get?", the second one, is a quiet mostly-acoustic ballad, not a Buzzcocks cover, and though it makes its way up the intensity scale as it progresses, it never gets much further than the level of the Sundays or Eddi Reader. The remake here is a Peel Session recording of "Nice Guy Eddie", the lead single from their previous album, The It Girl. The original relied heavily on a square-wave synthesizer skeleton, and this performance does an admirable job filling the synthesizer's role with guitar, even, it seems to me, smoothing over some of the hesitancy of the album version to shift more of the song's emphasis to its plaintive choruses.