Atlantic / Wea
2001
Strange Little Girls
About This Album
Something that goes unspoken in the cult of Tori Amos is that she knows the value of press and that she knows how to exploit it. So, six albums into her career, and several years since she captured headlines, she released Strange Little Girls, a collection of covers intended to strike a dagger into the heart of how males view females in pop songs. To be honest, you wouldn't know that from listening to the record, but you might have an idea by looking at the four separate collector-oriented covers, and reading the reviews, previews, and interviews Tori did prior to and at the time of release. The only track that really feels that way is Eminem's "97 Bonnie and Clyde," where Amos heightens the tension by close-mic'ing her vocals and reading with a hammy theatricalness that results in a cut about as chilling as the original, but without the context. After that, there really aren't many songs that sound like they're a female switch in perspective, apart from maybe the Stranglers' title track (which she does a nice job with), and it's very hard to tell what she's trying to say with these songs. Is she the fat blonde actress in the Velvet Underground's "New Age"? Mother Superior in the Beatles' "Happiness is a Warm Gun" (recorded with an anti-gun recitation from her father)? Is she the chair in Depeche Mode's "Enjoy the Silence"? How does Tom Waits' "Time" fit into the equation? Tori never tells us, either lyrically or through her musical arrangements -- witness the bizarre deconstruction of Neil Young's "Heart of Gold," another song that doesn't seem to fit her theme, so she dresses it up in flanged guitar and neo-trip-hop beats.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,6,7,9 and 12)

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.