HERE are two collective projects from the Nonesuch label, one centred on one voice set to myriad musical styles, the other bringing myriad stellar voices to a clubby dance template.

Seven years have passed since former 10,000 Maniacs lead singer Natalie Merchant made a record: time well spent judging by her set of 26 romantic, absurd, spiritual, amusing and sad songs, adapted from poems by writers both familiar and unknown. Ogden Nash, e.e. cummings, Christina Rossetti, Edward Lear and Robert Graves sit alongside anonymous nursery rhymes and lullabies, all brought to life by Merchant’s mellifluous voice in tandem with the Wynton Marsalis Quartet, The Chinese Music Ensemble of New York, Lunasa, The Klezmatics and more besides. Better still, her earnestness has gone at last.

Merchant contributes elegantly to David Byrne & Fatboy Slim’s Here Lies Love, a 22-track song cycle about the life of the former First Lady of the Philippines, Imelda Marcos, and her childhood servant, Estrella Campus, that should have worked better than it does. Florence Welch, Steve Earle, Cyndi Lauper, Martha Wainwright, St Vincent, Tori Amos, Sharon Jones, Santigold, Katie Pierson, Camille, Allison Moorer, the names pile up like Imelda’s shoes, but nothing quite satisfies in a marriage of theatre and disco too reminiscent of Malcolm McLaren’s gimmicky fusion of opera and hip-hop.