The biggest disappointment (musically) of the year came last week when Scarlett Johannson released an album of Tom Waits covers. This sounded like a great concept on paper and even had several sources saying it was going to be better than most would think. Even Tom Waits signed off on the approval after hearing several of the preliminary cuts.
On the whole the album is awful. The production quality is completely awful and SJ sounds like a mesh between a bad 80s singer and Enya. I won't go into to much detail here because some of the Amazon reviews have already said it better than I ever could. Here are some of the highlights:
"Who is the drunken man warbling on this CD and why is he calling himself Scarlett Johansson? Enough said."
"The music over powered her singing and what I could hear of the singing it needed to be drowned out. It wasn't what I expected."
"Instead, Sitek (the Producer) sounds like he's scoring a slow-motion car chase shoehorned into a chick-flick while Johansson mumbles about heaven-knows-what. "
"I don't need to go into how it sounds like a technopop mess, or how her vocals are neither raspy nor over exaggerated like the original material. She's uninspired, flat, and the whole thing has an underlying sound that can only be described as a dog trying to fart into a tuba underwater. "
OUCH!
-T
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