Sinead O'Connor: Am I Not Your Girl? [Chrysalis/Ensign, 1992]Over and above Irish-American backlash and papal maledictions from the depths of the catacombs, this muddled project stiffed because no one understood it, possibly including O'Connor. At least half the titles aren't "standards." I mean, Rice & Webber? Early Loretta Lynn? "Scarlet Ribbons"? An anticlericalist sermon? A putative Marilyn Monroe song that made a bigger splash when Helen Kane did it in 1928? A samba? Doris Day's "Secret Love" (which as it happens was the first record I ever bought, though I came to prefer the B side, "The Deadwood Stage")? All they share (except for the sermon) is that they are not rock (and also, conceivably, that O'Connor grew up with them, as she claims). But unlike La Ronstadt, O'Connor has no not-rock audience, and little not-rock savvy. Instead of hiring some reasonable substitute for Nelson Riddle--Billy May, or her Red Hot + Blue crew--she relies on high-grade hacks like Torrie Zito and Rob Mounsey. Even thorough their blare she sounds so defiant, so vulnerable, so sexual that at times she could be the greatest natural singer since Aretha. So up till the last three cuts, she almost gets away with it. But she doesn't. B
>>129103656>Doris Day's "Secret Love" (which as it happens was the first record I ever boughtHa ha he admitted it.
>>129103656Is he right?>Surrender [Capitol, 2022]>It so happens that in early 2016 I briefly tutored unmistakably bright-and-a-half NYU senior Rogers, whose plan to write an Alanis Morissette 33 1/3 was shelved when Pharrell Williams, then artist in residence at NYU's Clive Davis Institute, heard something in "Alaska" that made her the biggest star the Institute has ever turned out. But it wasn't until early 2019 that Capitol dropped her Heard It in a Past Life album, which I'm not the only one to find overcooked the way multiproduced major-label debuts can be. So I was chuffed to learn that instead of rushing to follow it up Rogers took time off to earn a master's at Harvard Divinity School as she pretty much less simultaneously came up with this cleaner and more focused long-player. Sonically, although with input from Harry Styles producer Kid Harpoon I bet, the music here bears the mark of a singer-songwriter who also leads her own band. Not that it's anything like spare. But despite its orchestral dimensions it projects plenty of detail--strident, yet so intricate that its intensity has a well-wrought delicacy to it. Although the themes are more emotional than erotic, there's plenty of eroticism in there--some spirituality with an appetite for permanence too. At 28, Rogers is no longer any kind of post-teen. You can tell. A-
>>129103671figures he was never actually cool enough to be one of those 50s kids who was buying R&B records before it was cool
>>129103671I mean he could have bought "'Till I Waltz With You" as his first record instead, so it might still be worse.
