The Twilight Singers: She Loves You : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Greg Dulli takes pride that the Shortstop, the bar in Los Angeles he co-owns with friends, has the city's best jukebox. This covers CD shows why. Dulli and mates, including Mark Lanegan on several songs, offer their interpretations of artists from Bjork and Fleetwood Mac to Marvin Gaye and Nina Simone. The album opens with a surprisingly tender version of "Feeling of Gaze," a song from Hope Sandoval's unheralded Bavarian Fruit Bread album of 2001. Dulli regains the swagger fans have come to expect of him on a street-fighting rendition of Martina Topley-Bird's "Too Tough to Die." Though Dulli shows real love for the originals, the band also turns the songs inside out, twisting Bjork's "Hyperballad" into an intoxicating pop/rock anthem and infusing Mary J. Blige's "Real Love" with a Seventies rock strut. It all comes together on Simone's "Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair," which is transformed into a sweaty howling wail of desperation, love and horniness.