Lisa Marie Presley: To Whom It May Concern : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

It has taken Lisa Marie Presley thirty-five years to find her voice, and here's the surprise: It's actually good. To Whom It May Concern, the debut album from Elvis Presley's only child, is a dark memoir, alternately regretful and scathing, dripping confessional acid. "Someone turned the lights out there in Memphis/That's where my family's buried and gone," Presley laments over the country-rock chug of "Lights Out." "Last time I was there I noticed a space left/Next to them there in Memphis in the damn back lawn."

The legacies of a messed-up family life and a famous name aren't the only bugs in Presley's ear. In the course of a dozen tracks, she rails against ex-husbands (including, presumably, Michael Jackson, to whom she was married in the mid-Nineties) as she mines her own vulnerabilities. "Maybe I'll stop wondering when I'm gonna die/Maybe then I'll stop holding so hard to my life," she spits on "Important.'' The track combines vitriol with a collision of strings and digital pop; imagine Alanis Morissette reborn as a beautifully dissipated bitch warrior.

Presley's surprisingly powerful voice swings from a low drawl to a blues-drenched wail, trumping Eric Rosse and Andrew Slater's glossy production - though the album's high-end pop treatment does bury the ballad "Gone" in sleek effects and renders "So Lovely," a hymn to Presley's children, sweeter than sap. Despite that, To Whom It May Concern displays a lot of heartfelt bite. If she lives up to the potential shown here, the King of Rock's daughter has a chance at becoming her own rock queen.

NEVA CHONIN
(From RS 921, May 1, 2003)