The thought of Tori Amos doing a full album of covers was cause
\nfor celebration for many-a-Tori fans. In concerts, she has treated
\nher fans to devastating covers of The Rolling Stones’ “Thank You,”
\nPrince’s “Purple Rain” and most famous, Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen
\nSpirit.” Like Margo Timmins of the Cowboy Junkies, Tori has a knack
\nof doing covers that occasionally surpass the original material.
\nSo, the though of Tori covering such classics as Neil Young’s
\n“Heart of Gold,” Slayer’s “Raining Blood” and Eminem’s “’97 Bonnie
\nand Clyde” was cause to celebrate.<\/p>\n
So\u2026 what the hell happened?<\/p>\n
For most longtime fans of an artist, there is one album that
\nputs fan loyalty to the limit. Bob Dylan’s
\nSelf Portrait<\/i>, Lou Reed’s
\nMetal Machine Music<\/i> and for Tori Amos fans, many cite either<\/p>\n
Boys For Pele<\/i> or
\nStrange Little Girls<\/i> as “deal breaking” albums. In
\ninterviews, Amos stated
\nStrange Little Girls<\/i> was not a “covers” album. Putting a
\nfemale voice and perspective to well-known tracks, one of Amos’s
\ngoals was to get the listener to see some of the material in a
\ndifferent perspective. And for some tracks, it works to a chilling
\neffect.<\/p>\n
The track that received the most press was her cover of Eminem’s
\n“’97 Bonnie and Clyde.” In Tori’s version, you can perceive the
\nsong to be the silenced voice of the mother in the trunk in
\nEminem’s tale of him murdering his estranged wife and taking their
\nchild along to help give the mother a burial at the bottom of a
\nlake. While Eminem’s cartoonish vocals and the initial shock of
\nhearing the contents in 1999 slightly deadened the reprehensible
\nsubject matter, Amos’s version holds your feet to the fire of the
\nsubject matter. Her cooing baby talk and slightly mocking accents
\nmake it one of the most hard to endure songs to listen to in recent
\nmemory. Still, while her cover is effective, it doesn’t necessarily
\nmake it a great song.<\/p>\n
That’s the problem with the majority of
\nStrange Little Girls<\/i>. While you can definitely see how
\ngiving a feminine perspective to “Raining Blood,” “Strange Little
\nGirls” and “Happiness Is AWarm Gun” would be inventive, some of the
\ntunes are half-baked, over-produced or even worse: boring. Her
\nnoisy, guitar-drenched cover of “Heart Of Gold” reeks of
\npretentiousness. For the anti-gun rendition of “Happiness Is AWarm
\nGun,” all Tori would have had to do is sing the song with her own
\nvoice to convey a stark anti-gun message – instead the listener
\nmust wade through sound bites ranging from news reports of John
\nLennon’s assassination to George W. Bush sound clips. Tori may be
\nthought-provoking, but she usually has enough respect for her
\naudience not to take a cheap route and needlessly beat the audience
\nover the head with a technique as cheap as using news sound
\nbites.<\/p>\n
Some tracks are good enough to almost merit a used copy
\npurchase. Her cover of Lou Reed’s “New Age,” her tongue-in-cheek
\ncover of Joe Jackson’s “Real Men” and the absolutely beautiful
\nrendition of uh\u2026Slayer’s “Raining Blood” rival some of
\nAmos’s best covers from her
\nLittle Earthquakes<\/i> and
\nUnder The Pink<\/i> era. But, in terms as a whole,
\nStrange Little Girls<\/i> is a mess of an album. Too avant-garde
\nfor its own good, too boring in places where it shouldn’t be and
\ntoo off-putting for even the most patient of listeners,
\nStrange Little Girls<\/i> is a failed experiment that can’t even
\nbe admired for its ambitions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":26000,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[5650],"rating":[11205],"class_list":["post-38268","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-tori-amos","rating-rating-d-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/38268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/38268\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38268"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=38268"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=38268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}