New albums from Folds and Amos share one similarity

Tori Amos

3 stars

Tori Amos' strengths - not in random order, incidentally - are her poetry, her piano, and her voice. For the past decade, she has been opening up her soul, enrapturing fans with songs that pour out emotion through chords, arpeggios, and personal tales of joy and sorrow.

This is why Strange Little Girls - Amos' latest effort, to be released tomorrow - just doesn't let her strongest light shine through. The gimmick is that Girls is a cover album, featuring only songs by males: songs of abuse, of love, and of violence, told now with a lilting tone rather than a masculine one.

There is no doubt that Amos has mastered the art of covering songs and interpreting them as her own - the album's undeniable strength lies in her talent for reinterpretation. She flawlessly morphs another artist's style into a new product that is her very own. The songs switch from a male point of view to one that is absolutely female and therefore take on a different meaning.

The result, however, is that most of the songs lose their kick and their original tone. Strange Little Girls is more a study of performance art than an album to play over and over again. Her words - which are not her own - don't sound like an extension of herself.

Take Neil Young's "Heart of Gold," or The Beatles' "Happiness is a Warm Gun." Young's once-plaintive ballad is retold with thrashing pianos, guitars, and voice, losing the gentle timbre that struck such a chord in the '70s.

Just as significant is how the Beatles' White Album wonder loses its pop sensibility and novelty. Amos plays piano and hums to a backdrop of recorded speeches intoning the merits of the right to bear arms versus anti-gun activists. From the outset, the song is not the innovation that the Beatles created - its merits are lost in her tirade of vocal acrobatics and piano, with the occasional original lyric creeping in. Interesting? Yes. Enjoyable? Not after the first time.

Similarly, the '80s bombast of Depeche Mode's "Enjoy the Silence" is lost in Amos' nearly a cappella version. Dave Gahan's haunting voice was the track's gem; Amos' interpretation, sans surging background music, just loses the industrial quality. Like most songs on the album, it's pretty, but Amos can write prettier tunes herself - the glow in her voice doesn't translate to covered material.

However, when Strange Little Girls treads on more Tori-ish material, it succeeds admirably. Her retouch on Joe Jackson's "Real Men" is glorious, both lyrically and musically, and a women's voice is the perfect touch. This is the most true-to-the-original cover on the album and one of the best. Lyrics about the war between the sexes and the merits of a good man take on new meaning through her vocals.

But perhaps the most successful track is one where Amos changes not only the musical style but the lyrics to convey her message. This is the creepiest song on the album and the most anticipated - and it's also the most disturbing bedtime story you'll ever hear.

When Eminem performs "97 Bonnie and Clyde," it's a rap set to the backbeat from "Just the Two of Us." The song features a father talking to his daughter as he asks for her help in killing her mother; the original, obviously, is chilling enough. Amos' version is a soft, spoken word piece, set to the sounds of pouring rain, now told from the mother's point of view. Her voice is soft, strained, and suffering as she says goodbye to her child from the trunk of her husband's car. It's the strongest cover song on the album, and perhaps the best interpretation into a female voice that the album features.

Strange Little Girls is far from a weak album. It clearly shows Amos' talent, drive, and ambition. But it's also a disc that's good for a single listen, a single marvel at her talent, and then should be set aside in favor of previous, more personal works.

Girls is interesting and well-done, adventurous and daring. But let Tori be Tori.

Ben Folds

4.5 stars

When people speak of Ben Folds, they usually refer to his "quirkiness" or "geekiness." They comment on how effectively he uses his piano, and then cite comparisons to Elton John and similar piano kings merely because they share the same instrument.

But Ben Folds' true genius, exhibited in his previous releases with Ben Folds Five and now in his solo effort, Rockin' the Suburbs, is his balladeering - his ability to tell charming, endearing stories that are relatable, intriguing, and emotive all at once. Folds doesn't write in abstractions, in poetry, or in fragments. He writes in the language and anecdotes of everyday life, and he weaves these stories through piano riffs and vocals saturated with boyish charm.

Take these character sketches from Folds' mind, his rockin' piano, and add choruses of jubilant claps and doo-wop harmonies, and you have what amounts to his own personal musical novel, complete with love and loss, jubilance and sorrow. The end result is pop music at its best - catchy and highly clever all at once.

Rockin'the Suburbs teems with interesting characters drawn, presumably, from Folds' past. Leadoff track "Annie Waits," also the album's strongest, is a clap-along/sing-along that tells of the age-old tale of being stood up... with Folds' role in the story revealed in the end: "Annie waits... but not for me."

"Still Fighting It" chronicles the sorrows of becoming too old for life. Now, if a band like Blink 182 was to sing a line like, "It sucks to grow up," they'd be "cute" but juvenile. Folds manages to back the words with a crescendo in music and a raw emotion that sounds poignant.

Poignancy then gets carried to a new level with "Fred Jones Part 2," the tale of a man past his prime, forced into retirement: "Twenty-five years he's worked at the paper/the man's here to take him downstairs," set to a perfectly slight piano that takes on just the right tone of loneliness.

One similarity Folds shares with piano men before him, notably the Piano Man, is a gift for lyricism. "Zak and Sara" could very well be called a modern day version of Billy Joel's "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant." This time there's no Brenda and Eddie, but the tale of "Sara spelled without an 'H' was getting bored/On a Peavea amp in 1984/While Zak without a 'C' tried out some new guitars/Playing Sara-with-no-H's favorite song." It's love, indie-style.

Most of Folds' songs deal with love in some form, but he closes the album on the wrong note - the same wrong note on which he closed all his others. "The Luckiest" is free of bombast and fun - it's an introspective meditation, just a simple ode to the one he loves. It's below par for the album, but still as sweet, genuine, and pure as the rest of his new solo work.