The Independent (London)
September 17, 1992, Thursday

The lady sings the blues

By ANDY GILL


    SINEAD O'CONNOR Am I Not Your Girl? (Ensign 09463 21952 2 7)

    AM I Not Your Girl? is what happens when sheer contrariness leads a
rebellious nature into collusion with retrograde conservative styles. The
sleeve- note explains this collection of orchestral arrangements of old
standards in typically peremptory fashion - ''These are the songs I grew up
listening to. They are the songs that made me want to be a singer. That's the
'why?' '' - but it's as if O'Connor's thought, I've got up everybody else's
nose, how can I get up my own audience's nose too?

    It's the kind of filler project that artists undertake to paper over a
writer's block, not the way to follow up your breakthrough album. Apart from the
single ''Success Has Made a Failure of Our Home'', where the orchestra's
startling melodramatic interjections clash profitably with her tremulous,
passionate vocal, the formula tends to play against her strengths: she's no
Peggy Lee or Julie London. Indeed, it could be argued that this kind of
torch-singing requires an acquiescence to which O'Connor is temperamentally
disinclined.

    Most of the time, the album suffers from an excess of solemnity, most
glaring when the material calls for something a little more brash and
vaudevillean, as on ''Why Don't You Do Right?'' and ''I Want to Be Loved by
You'', whose ''boop-boop-be-doo'' is particularly uncomfortable. Compared with
her work on the upcoming Peter Gabriel album, which is brimful of sensitivity
and emotion, these hesitant, tentative torch songs are deeply disappointing.
Sinead O'Connor is one of the few modern vocalists with the ability and wit to
be able to take a song apart and re-contextualise it, but here she kowtows
meekly to her material. Neither she nor it profits aesthetically from the
collaboration.