Published on Feb 23, 2005
The thought of Tori Amos doing a full album of covers was cause
for celebration for many-a-Tori fans. In concerts, she has treated
her fans to devastating covers of The Rolling Stones’ “Thank You,”
Prince’s “Purple Rain” and most famous, Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen
Spirit.” Like Margo Timmins of the Cowboy Junkies, Tori has a knack
of doing covers that occasionally surpass the original material.
So, the though of Tori covering such classics as Neil Young’s
“Heart of Gold,” Slayer’s “Raining Blood” and Eminem’s “’97 Bonnie
and Clyde” was cause to celebrate.
So… what the hell happened?
For most longtime fans of an artist, there is one album that
puts fan loyalty to the limit. Bob Dylan’s
Self Portrait, Lou Reed’s
Metal Machine Music and for Tori Amos fans, many cite either
Boys For Pele or
Strange Little Girls as “deal breaking” albums. In
interviews, Amos stated
Strange Little Girls was not a “covers” album. Putting a
female voice and perspective to well-known tracks, one of Amos’s
goals was to get the listener to see some of the material in a
different perspective. And for some tracks, it works to a chilling
effect.
The track that received the most press was her cover of Eminem’s
“’97 Bonnie and Clyde.” In Tori’s version, you can perceive the
song to be the silenced voice of the mother in the trunk in
Eminem’s tale of him murdering his estranged wife and taking their
child along to help give the mother a burial at the bottom of a
lake. While Eminem’s cartoonish vocals and the initial shock of
hearing the contents in 1999 slightly deadened the reprehensible
subject matter, Amos’s version holds your feet to the fire of the
subject matter. Her cooing baby talk and slightly mocking accents
make it one of the most hard to endure songs to listen to in recent
memory. Still, while her cover is effective, it doesn’t necessarily
make it a great song.
That’s the problem with the majority of
Strange Little Girls. While you can definitely see how
giving a feminine perspective to “Raining Blood,” “Strange Little
Girls” and “Happiness Is AWarm Gun” would be inventive, some of the
tunes are half-baked, over-produced or even worse: boring. Her
noisy, guitar-drenched cover of “Heart Of Gold” reeks of
pretentiousness. For the anti-gun rendition of “Happiness Is AWarm
Gun,” all Tori would have had to do is sing the song with her own
voice to convey a stark anti-gun message – instead the listener
must wade through sound bites ranging from news reports of John
Lennon’s assassination to George W. Bush sound clips. Tori may be
thought-provoking, but she usually has enough respect for her
audience not to take a cheap route and needlessly beat the audience
over the head with a technique as cheap as using news sound
bites.
Some tracks are good enough to almost merit a used copy
purchase. Her cover of Lou Reed’s “New Age,” her tongue-in-cheek
cover of Joe Jackson’s “Real Men” and the absolutely beautiful
rendition of uh…Slayer’s “Raining Blood” rival some of
Amos’s best covers from her
Little Earthquakes and
Under The Pink era. But, in terms as a whole,
Strange Little Girls is a mess of an album. Too avant-garde
for its own good, too boring in places where it shouldn’t be and
too off-putting for even the most patient of listeners,
Strange Little Girls is a failed experiment that can’t even
be admired for its ambitions.