The Daily Telegraph September 18, 1992, Friday RECORD OF THE WEEK By CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY AM I NOT YOUR GIRL? Sinead O'Connor Ensign SINEAD O'CONNOR made her debut bovver-booted and screaming with rage, daring us not to admire her for her courage and her self-assertion. With Am I Not Your Girl? she returns as a wispy, wounded waif - daring us not to love her for her frailty. Am I Not Your Girl? is what we used to call a "roots move" (in the tradition of David Bowie's Pin Ups, John Lennon's Rock and Roll or UB40's Labours of Love), but instead of revisiting Sixties beat, Fifties rock 'n' roll or rhythm and blues, or Seventies reggae, O'Connor cites the influences of such divas as Elaine Paige, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, wheels on a 50-piece orchestra, and trawls through a library of show tunes and big ballads. Yet instead of producing a conventional capitulation to showbiz mores and pre-rock notions of "quality" (as Linda Ronstadt and Carly Simon have done with similar exercises), O'Connor is out to subvert the standard Broadway-musical approach, which is to crank up the lung-power and belt the songs to the rafters. O'Connor mews them in a still, small voice, underplayed to such an extent that low notes virtually disappear. It is almost as if the orchestrations are emphasising her fragility. The juxtaposition of Don't Cry For Me Argentina with I Wanna Be Loved By You (the latter complete with the Marilyn Monroe "boop-boopee-doo") brings out the bathos in both, an effect possibly not intended by the composers. The result is still more eerie alongside the rant against child abuse in the CD booklet (or album sleeve), and the lapsed-Catholic diatribe which closes the album. The irony is that O'Connor has already demonstrated on previous recordings that she can sing considerably more powerfully than this (the Prince composition Nothing Compares 2U is but one example), so this flimsiness does not represent vocal inadequacy so much as a conscious artistic choice. It's also exquisitely calculated to offend both feminists, who treasure O'Connor as an icon of defiance, and show-song purists.. And of course it works. You want to give this "girl" a bowl of porridge with hot milk and honey, and tuck her up by the fire until she stops shivering.