Strange Little Girls

We diverted to a bit of Tori Amos discussion in the "Desert Island" thread, and I'm curious as to what you other Tori fans think of her latest offering, "Strange Little Girls." I of course own it, but I'm not all that impressed. I love a lot of her covers, but I think a majority of the covers on this album are uninspired.

Especially disappointing was "Heart of Gold." I LOVE Neil Young's original, but Tori has taken all of the emotion out of it and made it into a clone of "Raspberry Swirl" with all sorts of eerie sounds and fast club-like drumming. Come on! '97 Bonnie and Clyde was another terrible choice. Why even cover that song? Just because of the subject matter? Musically it's a complete miss. Raining Blood is pretty disastrous too.

I mean I like the title track, and "Real Men" and "I Don't Like Mondays" but I think she really picked some of these covers just to make people think "wow, she covered THAT?!?" rather than picking songs she had a good inspiration for, or a good idea on how to cover...

So, any opinions on this one?

I bought it without knowing that it was all covers. I was very surprised to discover that fact when I began listening to it.

I think that "Heart of Gold" is a cool twist on the original, as well as the spooky version of "I'm Not in Love". My favorite is the very-plain piano/voice rendition of "Enjoy the Silence".

I don't think the point was to make covers that were as good or better than the originals. I think she wanted to deliberately twist them, and I think she did a great job.

Okay, for a different frame of reference on the topic, who here likes Andy Summers' song "Mother" on the Police album "Synchronicity"? It's a very unpleasant piece of music, right? It's the track you always skip. Okay, but how about viewed in this light: It was Andy's attempt to twist a twelve-bar blues riff so far off the mark that you wouldn't recognize it as a blues song any more. Now give it another listen in that context. You might still not like listening to the tune, but you can at least appreciate its artistic merit.

Ah... This might play towards your Prog Rock leanings, i.e. "Music that makes musicians happy, not audiences." I am all about artistic expression, but I like to buy albums where the songs sound good musically, in addition to making the artist happy. I know it's a delicate balance.

Now "sounding good" is a very subjective term of course, but she's done so many GREAT jobs on other covers (Lovesong, Little Drummer Boy, Light my Fire, on and on...) that these really surprised me. It's like she wasn't even trying to add any emotion to the songs. Enjoy the Silence really bothers me because it's so drab and boring, it completely lacks the power of the original. I know that's probably what she was going for, but it doesn't make the song any better!

I guess I totally agree with your last statement, in that I can appreciate the artistic merit of taking these covers and "twisting" them. But the twisting ends up really sucking hard on all but a few of the tunes, when she has shown an ability to do wonderful covers in the past. Especially considering this is a studio album and not off-the-cuff covers on a radio show or by request at a live show.

In the immortal words of Butthead, "uhh.. huhuhuh.. she needs to, like, try harder or something."

I don't know if it's on the album or not, but I saw a little video of her doing a cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" that I wasn't all that impressed with. It was just her on the piano. Oh wow. Anybody I know that could sing and play intermediate piano could have done the same thing. It wasn't really much of anything.

Then again, I'm not a Tori Amos fan. It's not that I don't like her or her stuff, I'm just not a fan.

She's had some pretty funny things to say about Robert Plant, though

> cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" that I wasn't all that impressed with

Yeah, that song is on her Crucify single CD, along with a cover of the Stones' Angie and Zepp's Thank You. I quite like her version of Spirit, it is one of the best covers I have ever heard from her. I am not surprised she came out with a whole album of "Torified" covers, she has certainly done enough of them over the years.

I like strange little girls.

Being a strange little boy, that comes as no surprise.

Wow, only two minutes for that reply. Cha-ching.

I was going to have one sooner, but the "Don't feed the trolls" post came to mind.