sour suRvrvoR

with a scratchy old-record sound. She sounds delighted and delightful on itthe most human thing on a powerfully sung album. Frank Lovece

Little Village Reprise 26713-2, CD, 46.24

Performance: A

Little Village is comprised of John Hiatt on guitar and occasional piano, Ry Cooder on guitars, Nick Lowe on bass, and Jim Keltner on percussion.
The band played together before when

they recorded Hiatt's excellenl Bring

the Family in an intense four-day blitz in 1987. Everyone wanted to play again but business got in the way and it took a few years to happen. Once the

contractual wrinkles were ironed out and the guys finally got down to their real business of making music, they did a sparkling job
The 11 songs here are all co-written

Diva: Annie Lennox

Arista 18704-2, CD; 50:04.

Performance: B Titled with as humorous an attempt at self-definition as John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Two Virgins, this first solo
Sound: A

pressed is disheartening. lmmensely talented, Lennox occasionally seems

as removed from the common man as

by the four Villagers. Hiatt sings lead on six, Lowe on two, Cooder on one, and the three singers share the remaining two. This allows a healthy diversity, as each has a distinctive style that complements the others. "Solar Sex Panel" is a slinky rocker
while "She Runs Hot," the most upbeat song here, features Cooder's signature

George Bush does: She claims in a press release that the title Diva is meant to be ironic, but she also believes the gorgeous cover shot of her is meant to depict faded beauty. Yeah, right. See for yourself. Lennox wrote eight of the 11 songs here, co-writing two of the others and covering the old Al Dubin-Harry Warren tune "Keep Young and Beautiful"

album

better half is a paradox-intensely soulful vo-

by Eurythmics' former

running over

sinewy Cooder

riff,

cals but somewhat soulless production. With her slightly reedy yet panther-slick voice and a quite haunting
musicality, Lennox weaves and insinuates like the bluesiest of torch singers: The dark and plaintive "Cold" will be

slides. "Take Another Look," with

smart Nick Lowe vocal and some swell wide-angle stereo, has a shimmery feel
$

sung in champagne-filled rooms for

years to come, and the crystalline tension of "Why" could push a brokenhearted lover to suicide (or therapy, at least). As phenomenally as Lennox

'o

a
aCU

OJ

sings, the production isn't warm

O)

enough to complement her. Swaddled in synth that constructs a sterile world at odds with her smcky voice, Diva posits Lennox as an otherworldly queen whose pain and comfort play out on a different, grander scale than ours. Lennox is both lead singer

o_

and background singer, majestically overdubbing herself from song to song. Sometimes this heroic design washes over you magnificently, as in "Why" and the utterly beautiful, contemplative "Primitive." When it fails, the dissonance between the power of the expression and the banality of the ex-