Sinead: The Bald Soprano Swings

Am I Not Your Girl?

Sinead O'Connor

Chrysalis Records

Let me get this straight: Sinead O'Connor, our favorite bald, Doc-Martened, Celtic provocateuse, is singing standards? With a 47-piece band?

Yup, and damned if it doesn't work--most of the time.

Connor vamps it up on "Why Don't You Do Right," a swing number whose conventional arrangement is only occasionally interrupted by her signature moans. Consider it the photographic negative of Madonna's Dick Tracy showboating.

"Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" is a spare arrangement over which O'Connor's luscious vocals are spread like nutella. It pays breathy homage to Billie Holiday's timing and Marilyn Monroe's sex appeal and is by far the best track on the album.

Sinead shifts gears and plays Big Band crooner on "Secret Love" and kicks Harry Connick Jr.'s ass. Unfortunately, she is not as successful with "Black Coffee," a blues/jazz lament. Lines like "Woman's born to weep and fret/ To stay at home and tend her oven/And drown her past regrets in coffee and cigarrettes" are delivered without irony, which is as shame since O'Connor doesn't believe this song and it shows.

"Success Has Made a Failure of Our Home" is definitely the weak link on this album because O'Connor's vocals get lost in the screaming trumpets of Doug Katsaros' neo-bop arrangement.

When O'Connor's vocals get a little thin, the listener's familiarity with some of these tracks is the magic ingredient that keeps the musical souffle from falling. For example, in "Don't Cry For Me Argentina," her approach is almost timid. She floats over the notes instead of taking them by the throat in her usual manner. But hey, this is Evita we're talking about. Everyone knows Evita (there's a picture of Andrew Lloyd Weber in the dictionary next to "cultural literacy"). And it's still Sinead! "I Want to Be Loved By You" contains a real lyrical bon-bon, Sinead O'Connor singing "boo boo be do."

Though enchanting, Am I Not Your Girl is not completely a bowl of cherries. The instrumental arrangement of "Don't Cry For Me Argentina" is incongruous, But then so is the album. The requisite torch song, "Gloomy Sunday," is about suicide, and "How Insensitive" is a glacial ballad about those last beautiful moments of a relationship when you tear his heart into little pieces.

O'Connor even talks up a little sermon at the end of the album about death, pain, crucifixion and the Holy Roman Empire. But the speech is reassuring--it's nice to know that she didn't have a complete personality transplant for this project. She's still subversive, trumpets, string section and all, which in its own way is quite an accomplishment.

To deliver a bit of treacle like "Love Letters" with strings and still be subversive is the ultimate coup. Am I Not Your Girl deserves a standing O.