Rickie Lee Jones
It's Like This
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Rickie Lee Jones likes to mess with musical tradition. After the tweaked trip-hop of 1997's unjustly dissed Ghostyhead, she returns to her tangled roots for another album of retooled pop standards. These are not radical deconstructions a la Cat Power -- just Jones lending her slurred, cozy drawl to material ranging from Traffic's "Low Spark of High Heeled Boys," delivered as a jazzy torch song, to a stripped-down take on Charlie Chaplin's "Smile." Jones' subversion is so delicate that her covers often seem closer to tribute than to interpretation. But while her reading of the Beatles' "For No One" (with Joe Jackson on piano) is true to the original, there is a sly wink in there. Jones
Read More leaves the narrator's original gender intact, transforming an innocuous love song into a suggestive Sapphic plaint delivered in the second person. She's seditious, this Rickie chick, even if she does have a sophisticate's cheekbones. (RS 850)
NEVA CHONIN
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