The San Diego Union-Tribune
September 17, 1992, Thursday

Sinead out of her element in new album

George Varga


   Sinead O'Connor, "Am I Not Your Girl?" (Chrysalis/ Haven't Got."

   Namely: Is this not a good album?

   The answer, alas, is: Yes, it is not, not by a long shot, despite the best
musicians and arrangements money can buy.

   The album's failure to ignite should be apparent even to those fans who have
never heard the original versions of the classic torch songs and big-band jazz
standards featured on this 11-song album, due in stores Tuesday.  And its
failure will most certainly hold true to those conversant with Sarah Vaughan,
Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Astrud Gilberto or even Doris Day, whose
"Secret Love" O'Connor unwisely covers here with at best dubious results.

   Undeniably, this 25-year-old Irish singer-songwriter is one of the most
promising (if overhyped) young female artists to emerge in recent years.
 But like Linda Ronstadt before her, she is dramatically unsuited to perform
big-band-driven songs and heavily orchestrated ballads that require a much
greater range, suppleness, sophistication and mastery of nuance and inflection
than O'Connor possesses.  Never mind the crucial ability to swing and improvise
that she doesn't even attempt, let alone achieve.

   Moreover, one can't help wondering if O'Connor's decision to release this
album is a stalling tactic designed to allow her additional time to write more
of the intensely introspective songs that made he earlier work so arresting.

   The first clue that things were amiss came when O'Connor recently credited
Julie London -- an at best marginal vocalist popular in the late 1950s -- as her
prime inspiration for recording "Am I Not Your Girl?"

   The next comes with the album itself.  On the opening cut (the vampy Peggy
Lee hit "Why Don't You Do Right?"), O'Connor struggles mightily to "sound"
American, a quest foiled by her rolling enunciation of the "r" in "right."
 Worse, she sounds stiff and tentative, rather than playful and knowing.

   Then there's her smarmy, amateur-hour version of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim
Rice's "Don't Cry For Me Argentina," which a teen-aged O'Connor reportedly sang
victoriously at talent contests in her native Ireland.  them.

   Apparently, she failed to realize that listening to something in no way
ensures being able to perform it well.  And because she is so understandably
worried about making any vocal gaffes, she sings with a rigidity and hesitancy
that precludes her injecting any personality or emotional depth that might make
these songs even partially her own.

   What results suggests a timid musical tourist who is respectful and even
reverential of her surroundings but unable (and hence unwilling) to contribute
anything to them.  The only song that O'Connor sounds comfortable and convincing
on is "Scarlet Ribbons," a folk (not jazz or Tin Pan Alley) classic popularized
by Harry Belafonte and later covered by Joan Baez.

   Her adaptation of country diva Loretta Lynn's "Success (Has Made A Failure of
Our Home)" is also intriguing, if only for its bizarre arrangement, while her
take on Katalin Karady's 1930's lament, "Gloomy Sunday," completely misses the
song's melancholy essence.

   The album's best selection?  A swinging, all-instrumental reprise of "Don't
Cry For Me Argentina." The worst?  The insufferably pompous, 80-second-long
spoken recitation that ends the album and includes such pearls of wisdom as: "To
live we have to die," "There's only ever been one liar, and it's the Holy Roman
Empire," and the concluding, "Yeah, I am angry but I'm not full of hate, I'm
full of love; God said: I bring not peace, I bring a sword.' "

   Hey, Sinead, is this not self-indulgent and unnecessary?