Macy Gray thinks she's crazy, but I don't think so. Her second album, The Id, is filled with references to her lack of sanity, from her exuberant theme song "Relating to a Psychopath," in which she reminds you that "your role model is in therapy" and would "rather remain a psycho" than take her meds, to the hilarious "Gimme All Your Lovin' or I Will Kill You," in which her love is requited by introducing the man she can't get to her AK-47. "It's amazing what a gun to the head can do," she concludes. "My baby loves me now as hard as he can/My methods may be suspect/But you gotta get love however you can."

Then there's that voice. There must be some insanity in anyone who sings like Daffy Duck with soul. But in the tradition of Louis Armstrong, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, there's something endearing in Gray's peculiar sound: In a world of Alicia Keys and Lauryn Hill, Gray's the least likely to succeed, but she's taken her lemon of a voice and made lemonade by bending her flat notes and creating an instrument that complements her trippy worldview. Gray's pipes aren't for everyone, but if you can't stomach them, I feel for you. You're missing some of the best soul on the planet.

The Id is not unlike Gray's brilliant 1999 debut, On How Life Is, filled with upbeat funk and mellow soul and exquisitely crafted songs about love and sex, with a little violence and a lot of humor. But she's really come into her own with psychedelic disco-soul anthems like "Sexual Revolution" and mellow midtempos like "Sweet Baby" and bluesy ballads like "Don't Come Around," sung to the guy she's breaking up with who wants to remain friends: "You wanted to leave me, baby," she tells him, "So won't you leave me alone?" The song is funny and sad and really true, all at once. Gray ain't crazy, because being crazy is about anti-social behavior, and her wish is for you to be loony alongside her. "Share your freak with the rest of us," she says on "Sexual Revolution," "'Cause it's a beautiful thang!" Gray lives somewhere deep inside her head, but her head is screwed on tight. Please don't take your meds, baby. Your kind of crazy is good for all of us. (TOURE)

Tori Amos Strange Little Girls (Atlantic)

In Strange Little Girls Tori Amos has made a record that is huge in its strangeness: twelve covers of songs written by men -- mostly for or about women, mostly without happy endings -- in which Amos sings from the other side of the anxiety and sorrow. It is dangerous work. Amos is messing here with hard, cynical, even predatory males, including Lou Reed, Depeche Mode, the Stranglers and Eminem, redirecting narrative and intent as if these songs were hers alone. And as a songwriter, Amos would surely flinch if such liberties were taken with her own stories. But she attacks the possibilities in Strange Little Girls with a grip and grit often missing from her other solo work, and her handful of bull's-eyes easily justifies her audacity.

Reed's "New Age" is typical of Amos' attention to emotional detail. The Velvet Underground's 1970 recording on Loaded was a tale of quick sex and faded glamour, Reed's rewrite of Sunset Boulevard for the Andy Warhol crowd ("You're over the hill right now/And you're looking for love"). Amos, however, turns to an earlier draft that Reed performed live with the VU in 1969, a first-person moan of a soul gorged with lust but racked with need. Scarring the heavy sigh of her electric piano with sneering-fuzz guitar, Amos boosts Reed's monotonic empathy ("Waiting for the phone to ring/Lipstick on my neck and shoulder") with the lived-in aroma of damp bedsheets and stubbed-out cigarettes. She also pulls "I'm Not in Love" out from under British ironists 10cc -- stripping their 1975 hit of its art-pop gleam, dragging the denial inside into the open -- and plugs Neil Young's "Heart of Gold" into a guitar-army squall cribbed from the Stooges' "I Wanna Be Your Dog," connecting the twin electricities of pure devotion and animal sex.

Amos can misread the point of a song's original arrangement. The Boomtown Rats' 1979 single "I Don't Like Mondays" was at once florid and chilling, arch pop journalism about a real-life tragedy: a teenage girl turned sniper. Amos' naked piano and the girlish hurt in her voice soften the horror, reducing the killing to candied tragedy. She replaces the beastly guitars in Slayer's "Raining Blood" with sepulchral piano but wails like she can't make up her mind whether she wants to be Laura Nyro or Diamanda Galas.

But Amos always shoots bravely, if not wisely, and it is all worthwhile just for "97' Bonnie and Clyde," in which Amos turns Eminem's wife-killing fantasy inside out: speaking in the afterlife whisper of the dead woman in the trunk of the car, comforting her baby daughter in the moments before her body is thrown into the water. "No more fighting with Dad, no more restraining order," she coos with relief, intoning the hook from the Eminem track -- the chorus of Bill Withers and Grover Washington Jr.'s "Just the Two of Us" -- in her own piercing falsetto, a liberated spirit soaring in love and anguish. Eminem may get the royalties, but he no longer owns the song. (DAVID FRICKE)

Live V (Radioactive)

Talk about miracles: Live, once unremittingly serious purveyors of three-chord diatribes of spiritual longing, have finally lightened up. On the lilting confessional ballad "Call Me a Fool," vocalist Ed Kowalczyk shares what he learned on what was apparently a long search: "I can't believe I finally found the key, the door, the trick/It was all in my mind/Now I'm one with the fools of love." Happy to be counted among the fools, Kowalczyk doesn't lampoon enlightenment on this hard-grinding hip-hop-tinged album, his group's fifth effort. But he's far less haughty about holiness than he was circa Secret Samadhi in 1997. Now he peddles the enlightened life with tongue in cheek and makes fun of a rival with sexual double-entendres on "Deep Enough." Kowalczyk may have filtered some of the bluster from his lyrics, but he has wisely left the jagged edges in his music. Whether stomping through a mean rock grind ("Simple Creed") or evoking a more reflective mood (the Glen Ballard-produced "Forever May Not Be Long Enough"), Live don't hit you over the head as much, but they're still a band of true believers, more interested in rousing people awake than merely entertaining them. (TOM MOON)

Richie Hawtin DE9: Closer to the Edit (Nova/Mute)

Richie Hawtin has always been a cerebral kind of guy, so it's no surprise that when the opportunity to give a brainiac push to the dance genre came along, he jumped at it. Cue the Final Scratch technology which the Canadian mixmaster found out about on one of his worldwide DJ travels, a computer based program that allows DJs to take apart tracks, filter them through and manipulate them right on the decks. Rather than banging it out loud and abrasive like a good many of his techno brethren, Hawtin takes this mix and tones it down. In fact, after his last effort, Decks, EFX and 909s, DE9 is almost bucolic. But listen close as seventy tracks find their way ripped up and deciphered including ones by Hawtin (alias Plastikman), along with Baby Ford and Detroit legend Carl Craig. It's an engaging gentle giant that won't be put down. (JOLIE LASH)

Kilopop! Un Petit Goûter (Future Fossil)

Kilopop! search for a solid identity throughout this sixteen-track collection but never really find it. Kilopop!'s birth as an alter-ego project -- a virtually unknown, yet influential, European pop group with a mock career spanning three decades -- for ex-Waitresses leader Chris Butler and vocalist Carla Murray yields a clever, catchy assortment of ambitious original pop and cool, collector-geek covers (Raymond Scott's "Coming Back Down to Earth," Geoff Goddard's "Sky Men," a jazz-hued interpretation of the Shaggs' "Who Are Parents?"). Originals range from brilliantly odd (the lo-fi anthem "Beat of the World," with its toy instrumentation, recalls late, lamented cult faves Pianosaurus) to just plain precious ("Millions & Millions" shows you what might happen if the Proclaimers bred with They Might Be Giants). The Farfisa-fueled "Gone I Go" betrays garage revivalist instincts, while the power-pop buzzer "Sure Wish That He Wasn't Here," with its incisive female vocal and good-girl-gone-bad lyrics, sounds like vintage Blondie (or the Waitresses, for that matter). As far as alter-egos go, I'll take XTC's Sixties psych-pop homage, the Dukes of Stratosphear, but Un Petit Goûter -- while not likely to fool anybody with its thin backstory -- isn't as slavish as the Dukes, and it could certainly find a place to frolic on more quirky tastebuds. (MARK WOODLIEF)

Gorky's Zygotic Mynci How I Long to Feel That Summer in My Heart (Mantra)

For their seventh long-player, Welsh pop romanticists Gorky's Zygotic Mynci continue to traverse the pastoral path of their recent The Blue Trees EP, fleshing out the prominent acoustic guitars and pianos with organs, theremin, and the occasional brass flourish. In contrast to the musical mind-fucks of fellow countrymen Super Furry Animals, Gorky's records have always been lovely, lilting and more than a little mysterious. The hushed beauty of songs "Easy Love" and "Let Those Blue Skies," makes you feel like you're eavesdropping on some enchanted forest glade, where assorted elves and sprites merrily meld their favorite parts of Neil Young's After the Gold Rush, E.L.O.'s A New World Record, and the third Velvet Underground LP. If the horrific events of recent weeks have placed a wintry chill in your heart, this gentle record will thaw you out nicely. (DAN EPSTEIN)

Buddy & Julie Miller Buddy & Julie Miller (Hightone)

Over the course of the last decade, singer/songwriter/guitarist/producer Buddy Miller has established himself as what one might call the Miracle Whip of modern-day cosmic American music. Genre giants Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle have called on his high harmony vocals and smart guitar leads on numerous occasions, while his compositions have landed on multi-platinum efforts by the likes of the Dixie Chicks and LeeAnn Womack. His wife Julie Miller has enjoyed a similar degree of behind-the-scenes success, while both have also turned out a handful of critically acclaimed solo albums. This is their first official joint effort, though the co-billing is less an event than a matter of calling a spade a spade, given how ubiquitous they've been on each others' solo albums in the past. The songs, mostly Julie's, are of uniformly high quality, covering solid but well-traveled ground, the sonic landmarks familiar to any fan of Harris, Earle and Lucinda Williams. What the Millers bring new to the table is an uncanny gift for harmony. Buddy and Julie don't "duet"; they morph into one voice -- a high, keening cry that brings to mind a banshee with a bluegrass soul. Shot through the opening cover of Richard Thompson's somber "Keep Your Distance," that voice is almost too much, like trying to bottle lightning in a baby food jar. But when they ease it into Julie's beautiful lament "Forever Has Come to an End," break it apart and reassemble it for dramatic impact on the charging "Dirty Water," or lift it into the heavens with "Rachel" (a stirring anthem inspired by a poem and drawing by the first student killed at Columbine High) -- they achieve genuine grandeur. (RICHARD SKANSE)

(September 17, 2001)