There are two things you should know about this album upfront: 1) it is a cover album, 2) it is a concept album.
The covers are moderately diverse, ranging from the Beatles to Eminem, with the Stranglers along the way for an, as yet, radio-only single. A fair number have been passed through the the standard Tori cover filter, with pared back instrumentation and old school Tori's strained singing. On the whole she doesn't do any real damage to the originals which will please certain turns of mind, frustrate others.
I sound overly harsh to my own ears here, but I'm listening to the originals right now, many fine creations, and I'm wondering what the point is. If I hadn't spoiled you with my second sentence you wouldn't have this problem. You might even think many of these are Tori originals and a thankful respite from electronic fiddling.
The point: Tori reimagining each song from the viewpoint of its female antagonist without changing the words. I suppose you were never going to get your hopes up for talking about a concept album's reasoning in polite company. This is a difficult task made more difficult by Tori's choice of titles. Few of the originals move beyond a nominally male but neutral voice. Her two biggest successes are telling on most of the modest failures.
The 'Bonnie and Clyde '97' cover is a gruelling song, near in the intensity of, and a perfect companion piece to, Eminem's 'Kim'. Unlike the slick original which rushes past, the meaning is here slowly teased out to terrifying effect. Tori's newsgroup image of battered fairy earth mother plays electrically against Eminem's media persona of misogynistic and marketed horror. This one is not for the weak of heart or stomach.
In a more radio friendly fashion Tori drives the ambiguity of Joe Jackson's 'Real Men' into poignant overdrive just by singing this straight. Questioning of traditional gender roles plays more to her concept than the simple predation exhibited in most of her choices. Possibly the real problem with the album's concept is that men afford themselves few roles in music which, in a few minutes, is necessarily sleight. I can't decide if we're fortunate or unlucky that Tori is a moderate in the war of the genders.
Her biggest mistakes are 'I don't like Mondays' and 'Happiness is a warm gun'. The former, a piece of pop journalism seems as divorced of meaning as your typical Saturday night gig might have it. The latter is confusingly misread into an overblown piece of political diatribe against guns. It is the only song to bear significant lyrical modification and also takes spoken additions. What Tori is trying to say in both cases is at its most impenetrable.
One thing occurs to me is that at least three of the songs (B&C97, IDLM, HIAWG) have real living female antagonists who can speak for themselves and I wonder what they would say about all this.
This is no Little Earthquakes, but also no Choirgirl Hotel. It's high points are very high, it's mistakes aren't fatal, and the rest is more than alright.
