The Independent (London) September 13, 1992, Sunday Sinead sings Evita By BEN THOMPSON WHAT DO you do when you're an international star who can't get a hit, and a tabloid demon in the Scargill and Gaddafi class, and the time comes for that famously difficult third album? Well, if you're Sinead O'Connor, you sign up producer Phil Ramone and a 47-piece orchestra, and wrap your contentious larynx around a sackful of standards, previously made famous by a gamut of legendary women singers; from Julie London to Alison Moyet, via Ella Fitzgerald and Elaine Paige (well, Julie Covington did ''Don't Cry For Me Argentina'' first, but I suppose Paige's name was more likely to cause outrage). No one need worry about Sinead having gone soft. Before Am I Not Your Girl? has even hit the streets, she's already appalled the guardians of our moral propriety at the Sun by clothing the first single from it in an Amnesty International photo of a murdered Guatemalan street child. Like many of O'Connor's grand gestures, this attempt to shock the world out of its complacency leaves her open to reasoned as well as knee-jerk criticism, but that has never stopped her before and it doesn't now. This album's sting in the tail, all the more arresting for being preceded by a hammy orchestral reprise of the aforementioned Evita anthem, is a quietly apocalyptic piece of holier-than-thou spoken word (''Can you really say you're not in pain . . . like me?''), which concludes that ''Then, or now, there's only ever been one liar, and it's the Holy Roman Empire''. We are then dealing with a middle-of-the-road performer - in the sense that a psychotic van- driver heading straight towards you is a middle-of-the-road performer. The surprise is that apart from the over-wrought and hyper- intense single ''Success Has Made a Failure of Our Home'', the renditions here are very subdued; more marks of respect than anything else. ''These are the songs I grew up listening to,'' Sinead informs us (not for her Little Jimmy Osmond) - ''the songs that made me want to be a singer''. Her interpretative approach to primed and loaded material like Marilyn Monroe's ''I Want to Be Loved by You'' and Billie Holiday's ''Gloomy Sunday'' is mostly just to sing it very quietly. Purists will no doubt be grateful for this unexpected show of restraint, but it's a shame that the battle of wills between O'Connor and her orchestra that ''Success Has Made a Failure'' promises never really materialises. This album was a good idea, and there is nothing really bad on it, but the effect of the whole thing - concluding fireworks notwithstanding - is rather muted. The most shocking thing about it is the realisation prompted by the straight- faced appropriation of Rice and Lloyd-Webber's lament of a dictatoress (''And as for fortune and as for fame, I never invited them in; though it seemed to the world they were all I desired''): that Sinead O'Connor might actually have a sense of humour.