The Scotsman Newspaper (U.K.)
September 14, 2001

Added Sept 20, 2001

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Tori's Strange Little Girls album was reviewed in the September 14, 2001 edition of The Scotsman Newspaper in the U.K.. It seems like a pretty good review. Thanks to Lucy for telling me.


BYLINE: Andrew Eaton

Tori Amos: Strange Little Girls
East West

WHILE her big brother was out running with a gang, Tori has plundered his record collection. The result is this concept album ... no hang on, it's really quite good: 12 songs performed by men, from the Stranglers to Slayer, rammed into her own personal juicer and re-interpreted.

She has always surprised with her covers, once stripping down Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit to side-saddle piano. Here, second song in, she takes on Eminem's wife-murder ballad 97 Bonnie & Clyde. Backed by stabbing strings, she sings in a whisper, in the character of the dead woman, and somehow manages to make a diabolical act seem like devotion.

That's the newest number; the oldest is the Velvet Underground's Loaded. Elsewhere, there's 10cc's I'm Not In Love shorn of its school-disco smoocher tune; again she almost breathes the words .

Violence is a recurrent theme. The Beatles' Happiness Is A Warm Gun begins with reportage of the killing of John Lennon and a (male) voice of doom intoning the Second Amendment about the right to "keep and bear arms." Again, it's almost unrecognisable from the original. Not all the reworkings work, but none could be called kookie, and for an Amos album that must be a first. She even includes songs by such monumentally unhip acts as the Boomtown Rats. In her hands I Don't Like Mondays quivers and throbs. It's sexy - something you never said about Bob Geldof. -AS



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