STRANGE LITTLE GIRLS

A sorta concept album for you. It's an album of all cover pieces. The concept, or more of theme, is to take songs written by men and put a female twist on it. In the CD booklet, she's made herself up like a different character for each song. Something she would repeat on American Doll Posse, only the characters were fewer and each responsible for several songs.

One of the things that pleasantly surprised me was to see Adrian Belew as a guest on almost all the tracks. I'd really like to know the story behind that, but haven't run across it yet. Adrian's contribution really makes this album for me.

Tori's done covers before this album that were quite good. The artists on this one are quite diverse: The Velvet Underground, Eminem, The Stranglers, Depeche Mode, 10cc, Lloyd Cole, Tom Waits, Neil Young, The Boomtown Rats, The Beatles, Slayer, and Joe Jackson. From what I've read, four other artists we're attempted but didn't work out and two others didn't make it to the album.

My favorite of these has to be the cover of Neil Young's Heart Of Gold. Adrian plays "yellow jacket guitar". The song has been deconstructed and reconstructed to the point that other than the lyrics, you probably wouldn't recognize it. I really like what they did to it.

There was one really spooky coincidental pick: Slayer's Raining Blood. This album was released on September 18, 2001, seven days after you know what. I've never heard the original but I like her version with the "bass painting" and Tori doing acoustic piano and vocals. Very creepy and my second favorite.

I really enjoyed the five re-workings of songs I was familiar with and the rest sounded quite alright, too.

Rounding down just because it's an album of covers. Didn't get quite over the halfway point.