Tori Amos (2 stars)
The Beekeeper
An overly honeyed album with the odd dollop of forced jazz, The Beekeeper comes across as smug and self-centered as Tori Amos' face staring out from the cover. A singer-songwriter in the truest sense, Amos has gotten a lot of traction out of turning her inner emotional life into art, most notably with 1991's "Me and a Gun," her breakthrough song about rape.
But Amos seems to forget that an entertainer's first responsibility is to entertain. With its unrelenting mellowness, occasionally broken by Amos trying to get down and funky (with results that make me wince in embarrassment for her as she tries to wrap her Enya lips around words like "hoochie"), Beekeeper fails in that regard. Yet, I have to give her props for writing a song about Daphne Du Maurier's famous pirate story.
Jessi Alexander (3.5 stars)
Honeysuckle Sweet
It's a nice by-product of the success of alt-country that mainstream country artists can tone down the glossy production, write their own songs and not be completely marginalized. Jessi Alexander's debut is mainstream country, with strong hooks, clean production and traditional subjects. But it's also got a healthy folk and rock influence, at times resembling Emmylou Harris, and offering nods to the 1970s sounds of acts like the Eagles and Jackson Browne.
Her warm, lilting voice holds the album together and is strongest on traditional country tunes like "I'd Run Right Back to You" and "Holdin' Back Your Love." Like many songwriters-turned-performers, Alexander addresses personal issues with her own material, lamenting the place of the modern woman in "Unfulfilled" and tackling current events in "This World is Crazy."
There is sometimes a sense of repetition with her familiar themes and sounds.But mostly, this is a good, unpretentious country album, with impeccable songwriting and a beautiful voice at its heart.