The Little Earthquakes version was brilliant, though, and this isn't that much worse. The latter is fairly pointless as remixes go, choosing only to add some guitars to the equation. The EP is rounded off with "Winter", taken straight from Little Earthquakes, and a remix of "Crucify". It's also a concept she'd never sound so completely at ease with, and a concept that would never again yield such results as this. This is a concept Tori would come back to several times in her career, most famously on the full-length covers album Strange Little Girls. The more astute amongst you will have noticed that all of the 3 songs Tori chooses to cover were written and performed, originally, by men. This, incidentally, was not Tori's first Zeppelin cover - she'd previously tackled "What Is And What Should Never Be". Indeed, her re-reading of "Thank You" amounts to a minor revelation - it demolishes Robert Plant's undeserved reputation as an oversexed, Lord Of The Rings-obsessed, uninspired lyricist, and reveals that hey, he can write some pretty d amn touching stuff when he wants to. Though, in these cases, I'm a big fan of the originals, Tori's versions are still better. The other two covers, "Thank You" and "Angie" (Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones respectively), are much the same. Having hated the song for years, I was forced to re-assess it as a decent song that Nirvana ruined through their own ineptitude and lack of confidence. As someone who holds an intense hatred for Nevermind, I was blown away when I first heard her cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" for this very reason. The benefit of using this style is that it lets Tori draw the natural poetry held within each song right to the surface. Stylistically, Tori doesn't deviate from the Little Earthquakes template (one woman and her piano) at all on this EP, but considering how well that served her, and how much her more recent releases have cried out for that level of intimacy, we can't complain. It is, needless to say, entirely different to the original. Remember, of course, that Winter was released in 1991, so Tori's cover appeared whilst the Nirvana original was still fresh and new. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was the song that first brought Tori to the world's attention, having been previously included on the Winter EP. One, in particular, caused a bit of a stir.
You'd need to be fairly braindead to have not realised that this EP is covers-heavy. Following the release and blanket critical acclaim of that album, she put out an epilogue of sorts in the Crucify EP. Her first EP, Winter, whetted the public's appetite for Little Earthquakes, her solo debut (she's previously been the lead singer of a failed hair metal group called Y Kant Tori Read). Tori Amos, in her early days, understood the EP.
My Bloody Valentine's Glider and Tremolo EPs, for instance, is a fantastic example of what EPs can do for a band - delivered months and months before Loveless, they saw the band coming into their own, and were responsible for an awful lot of the hype surrounding the release of Loveless. In the early 90s, though, a lot of bands understood the importance of the EP, whether they used it to try out new ideas they weren't entirely sure about, to expand on the ideas they'd presented on a recently released album, to give a taster of what's to come, or even simply to tide their fanbase over until their next major release. It contained the title track, a live version of "Paschendale", and a demo version of "Journeyman". You know the most recent EP I bought? Iron Maiden's No More Lies. How many of you, honestly, own an EP? They were de rigeur throughout the 60s, 70s, and most of the 80s, but now most bands don't even bother with them.
Tori Amos - Crucify EP Released July 7th, 1992.Ītlantic Records.The more time goes on, the more I'm beginning to think that the EP, like the B-side, is a lost art form.
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