STRANGE LITTLE GIRLS

Tori Amos
(Warner)

RATING: three and a half

Consider Tori Amos, an incredibly original artist who has the world’s most devoted following. She could probably record herself burping into a microphone, and still have a legion of fans go out and line up three deep at the record stores for it. Bootleg recordings of her concerts have also found a steady audience, and her record label’s only begun to realize that they should also corner that market: Last year’s release was the hefty To Venus and Back, the second disc of which was made of live concert recordings. It was relatively inexpensive, and the label-sanctioned recording was, for once, unmuffled, so fans were glad for the official alternative to the unauthorized recordings. Still, bootlegs had an advantage: covers.

Tori’s covers are really something to behold. Her versions of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Led Zeppelin’s “Thank You,” and even the Don McLean classic “American Pie” are concert (and bootleg) staples that have been made unrecognizable from the original. Done in her own style, Tori’s covers are not so much a redoing of the song as a true reinvention: it’s not just the singing voice that’s different, it’s the entire vision of the song.

The metamorphoses aren’t just in the obvious—that it’s been feminized, nor even that the dominant instrument has become the piano. She has imbued the covers with a deeply emotional edge that isn’t always present in the originals. So it’s not a surprise, really, that her new outing, Strange Little Girls, is all about cover versions and Tori’s re-visions of other artists’ work.

The surprise is in her choice of songs. Where her live covers are mostly tributes to her musical idols, Strange Little Girls is not so much interested in homage as in obliteration. The Beatles, Slayer, Depeche Mode, Bob Geldof, Eminem, and Neil Young are just some of the artists that don’t exist in this strange little parallel universe. This is what their songs would sound like if they never were around, and it was Tori Amos who came up with it all.

Sometimes the obliteration isn’t complete. Depeche Mode still sound through on the cover of 1990’s “Break the Silence,” though it’s been slowed down to a crawl and Depeche Mode’s trademark instruments stripped off. Likewise, “I Don’t Like Mondays” is still easily identifiable with the original, though this version has only a shy electronic keyboard in the background to remind us of the new wave sound of the Boomtown Rats’ 1979 classic.

But elsewhere, Tori just takes absolute control of the songs—nowhere more obviously than on her update of “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” from the Beatles’ White Album. Where the original was a brief (if bizarre) pacifists’ anthem that was less than three minutes long, this 2001 update is almost 11 minutes long, and, like those dance-floor remixes, this version is infused with so much new material that it really just samples the Beatles’ original. This monster track opens with a snippet of a news report of a shooting, segueing into an excerpt of a speech about the constitutionality of gun ownership in the US, which in turn becomes fragments of interviews from people on both sides of the gun debate. What it loses in subtlety, it gains in sheer aural lushness. Like Tori’s “Space Dog,” off her album Under the Pink, this version of “Happiness is a Warm Gun” is a dream track—so full of detail that it’s disjointed but utterly hypnotic.

And then there’s “’97 Bonnie & Clyde.” Where Eminem’s foul mouth shocked with a grisly tale of murder, Tori’s whispered delivery is all that more chilling. Never mind that she’s telling the story as is, from the husband’s point of view, when she murmurs, “C’mon Hai-Hai, we goin to the beach/ Grab a couple of toys and let da-da strap you in the car seat/ Oh where’s mama?/ She’s takin a little nap in the trunk/ Oh that smell?/ Da-da musta runned over a skunk,” it’s genuinely frightening. Eminem might have a genius for rhyme, but he has absolutely no gift for either subtlety or suspense, and these are the missing elements that Tori brings to the track.

However, the best cuts on Strange Little Girls aren’t necessarily the most inventive covers. Tori’s version of “Strange Little Girl” from the obscure British group the Stranglers has shed all of the aggression that defined the original, becoming instead a pleasant, upbeat track. The cover is but a declawed and neutered version of the original, but if one were to ignore the 1982 version, the sheer appeal of Tori’s rendering places makes it one of the best on the album.
The other highlight is the cover of “Time,” where Tori Amos out-Waits Tom Waits on the melancholy, poetic track. The instrumentation and arrangement are different, but Tori’s delivery is essentially, if not exactly, like Waits. It’s was a beautiful song when Tom Waits first released it, full of lines as lyrical as these: “their memory’s like a train/ you can see it getting smaller as it pulls away/ And the things you can’t remember/ Tell the things you can’t forget that/ history puts a saint in every dream.” It’s been 16 years since Waits wrote the song, but it has lost none of its evocative power.

However, question of value does rear its problematic head here. Is it Tori Amos’ contributions to the track that makes it so good, or was it the foundation that Tom Waits lay down all those years ago?
It’s not an academic question, because there’s something inherently disappointing about cover albums. If you’re a fan of the covering artist, wouldn’t you rather have an album of new originals? If you like the songs that are covered, can any other version really stand up to the first? Furthermore, some of these songs are tied to their contexts—surely “I Don’t Like Mondays” loses a lot of its story when no one even remembers that it was about a 1979 shooting tragedy. Sure, there’s novelty value, but novelty wears off very quickly.

Of course, done right, a cover version can greatly enhance the song and be much more commercially successful than the original, even. Lately, there was Ronan Keating’s version of Allison Krauss’s “When You Say Nothing at All,” and Fiona Apple’s repopularization of the Beatles’ “Across the Universe.” On the flip side, there have been just far too many cover attempts gone wrong. Emma “Baby Spice” Bunton’s cover of Edie Brickell’s “What I Am” comes to mind: it was a note-for-note cover that managed to contribute nothing new, and yet somehow managed to mangle the original.

Tori Amos manages to do covers right: with respect and affection for the originals, but with just enough irreverence to take the necessary liberties with the material. Strange Little Girls is not as exciting as a Tori Amos album of new songs, but with the way she does covers, it doesn’t feel right to call it anything but original.—Kristine Fonacier