Pros: another thought-provoking and well-crafted Tori album about gender
Cons: naturally, some of the songs are more difficult to get into (the slower songs)
The Bottom Line: This album definitely passes the late-night driving test, the most vital and telling of all music tests. Read on to learn more about Tori's sixth and newest album.
brianne's Full Review: Strange Little Girls by Tori Amos
Strange Little Girls, Tori Amos' sixth major album is just coming out. (Or fifth, if you count To Venus and Back as an album, which it doesn't really feel like.) If you're a Tori fan, you know that she refers to all her songs as girls, which explains also the title of her fourth album, From the Choirgirl Hotel. If you think about it, all but one of her album titles directly refer to gender, you have Under the Pink, Boys for Pele, From the Choirgirl Hotel, To Venus and Back, and finally Strange Little Girls.
The gimmick with Strange Little Girls is a good one: Tori covers 12 songs, each written and originally sung by males. All in the frame of The White Album to Eminem, which is basically the palate of modern music. Tori says that as she was breastfeeding her daughter Natashya, she had ample time to consider the gender climate of late, and its sometimes-violence. "I don't know what my daughter's choices will be in twenty years--any of our daughters could be these strange little girls," she says. "I didn't know that these words from men would take hold of me. I thought I'd find out something about them. Instead, I found something out about myself." As a longtime Tori fan, I would say this album is one of her most personal. Tori embodies the female characters/subjects of every song, in fact, she plays those characters, replete with makeup and wardrobe. In fact, the album cover will be one of four of the main characters, and most of the press about the album uses Tori as each of these strange little girls.
"I'm not these people, but I can find each one inside," she says. "I'm not the mother of these songs--the men who wrote them are--but I became a sort of foster mom."
The most striking songs on this album are "Strange Little Girl" and "Enjoy the Silence" covers of first the Stranglers (imagine them with a catchy song) and Depeche Mode. Perhaps I'm just saying that because I know these two songs the best in their original forms. And though I could listen to "Happiness is a Warm Gun" for hours, Tori takes the melody so far away from the original that it's difficult for me to get into hers, because the Beatles' melody is so intoxicating. (Have you heard U2's version? It's simply amazing and keeps the original melody.) "I'm Not in Love" is intoxicating, though, and a great song to jam to.
This is what Neil Gaiman, best friend of Tori and esteemed writer of the Neverwhere series, says of the album, which he has written stories for: "So, for the record, yes I really like the album. I think it's the best thing Tori's done in a while, and it's, in my opinion, her most personal album for years. I would be astonished if there wasn't at least one track every dyed in the wool Tori fan loved immediately, and equally as surprised if there wasn't at least one track that they disliked equally as strongly -- it's that sort of record)."
And I do find myself disliking some of the songs. . . I just don't get "I don't like Mondays" and "The New Age" all that much, while I think "Rattlesnakes" and "Strange Little Girl" rock. This is an album, well, like all albums, that you have to discover for yourself. You don't buy a Tori album to have the hit song, you buy the Tori album to see if you can get at the meat of the recording. See what you think of her Eminem cover, "'97 Bonnie & Clyde" which it totally haunting and not something you want to listen to over and over again, especially while driving in traffic. Tori's emotional and vocal delivery of Depeche Mode's "Enjoy the Silence" is "intense" (for lack of a better word), not the least because when she sings "words like violence come crashing in" and you remember Tori's work against violence against women with her RAINN organisation and her own experience being raped, channelled into the song "Me and a Gun" from her first album as well as "Silent All these Years" which came to be RAINN's theme song. So Tori says, "violence" and it is peraonal and thematic, consistent in her career.
A cover album is a neat thing from Tori, who received great acclaim for her chilling piano version on "Smells like Teen Spirit" on the "Crucify" single for her first album, so five albums later and -is it ten years?- she goes back to the strength of her singing other's songs. My personal favorite Tori cover is "Do it Again," a Steely Dan song that gets me weak in the knees, found on the "Spark" import. So, in a way this album is a very strong work in terms of Tori's whole career, and her main messages as an artist, and for these reasons I find Strange Little Girls very intriguing.
Strange Little Girls is something to be critically listened to not only for the music but for what she's really saying, which are all things that need to be said about gender in post-post-post-modernity, and perhaps not only what it feels like for a girl, but what it feels like for a boy.
The new studio album from Tori Amos, Strange Little Girls, is an assemblage of songs written by men, but performed by Tori from the perspectives of a ...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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