Strange Little Girls

This is not a feminist album. It is an album that shows just another facet of each song. 'I'm Not In Love' may sound as a cliché choice but Amos rips it off its romantic meaning and makes it haunting and chilling it its nakedness and simplicity. 'Time' and 'Real Men' just shows Tori's unqiue pianostyle and respect for the orginals. 'Heart of Gold' is a distorting unearthy raw track sung by twins. 'Rattlesnakes' and 'I Don't Like Mondays' allow Tori to introduce a new toy: a Fender Rhodes. The songs sound like lullabies but ones with a deeper meaning. 'Happiness Is A Warm Gun' is a 10 minute protest to guns and violence (a central theme on the record) and what it can do, like words 'they can only do harm' to quote Depeche Mode's 'Enjoy the Silence'.

The title track, orginally by the Stranglers, is the most catchy tune of the album that shows Amos's musical diversity and creativeness. MOst haunting however is Eminem's ''96 Bonnie & Clyde'. It tells the story of a man murdering his wife and trying to explain this to his child. Amos places herself in the position of the woman lying in the trunk hearing the way her husband speaks to her child. It's better than the original.

Amos' vast talents as a songwriter & performer can lead to her skills as a producer being overlooked. Have a listen to this to find out what i mean. So much anger at the violence and cruelty of the way we let the world be run is crammed in to some of the softest, most intimate moments of the record.

It's a shame that people might dismiss it as "just a covers album". It couldn't be further from that, it's a masterpiece.

(You may have guessed I'm a fan... Still, I would certainly put this in my top 3 Tori albums, and I'm not just saying that!)

Anyway, there's some good tracks on here, and mostly it is a pretty good album to listen to. Some tracks however, such as '97 Bonnie and Clyde, are very effective the first couple of times but don't really warrant repeat listenings. Still, it's better than actually listening to Eminem. Other tracks don't really stand out, and the 9-minute cover of Hapiness Is A Warm Gun, with news excerpts about John Lennon's shooting, is overlong and way too obvious. I will admit that I haven't heard the original versions of a lot of these songs, but surely the album should still stand up in its own right? I found that, rather than being able to admire Tori's songwriting, all there was to admire was what style she had chosen to perform each song in. I was also especially intruiged to see what she would do with Raining Blood (a Slayer cover), but she's turned it into a tuneless mess of slow piano chords and mumbled singing.

As for the meaning behind the songs, the idea was that she would get people to suggest songs for her to cover that were written by men about women. In the booklet we get pictures of Tori dressed up like the characters in each song, with a sentence about them like "Whenever it rains you think of her" and "She wonders what her daughter will do". It's difficult to know what some of these are supposed to mean, and indeed if it's worth making the effort to interpret them when the most important messages seem to be in the lyrics of the songs anyway (Real Men for example). That's pretty mch how the album goes, some of the ideas may be clever, but so what if the album isn't that great to listen to in itself?

I do feel kind of bad giving this album 2 stars, because I do like Tori Amos lots, but this CD isn't exactly fantastic. For someone not already into Tori Amos, I would reccomend Little Earthquakes and Under The Pink as first choices.