Scarlett Johansson
Anywhere I Lay
My Head
Atco Records
By Jose Fritz
Attractiveness in the human female is defined by sexual preference, personal taste and a complex array of primary and secondary sexual characteristics. More quantitative putative qualities can be measured as body mass index, shape, waist-hip ratio and general symmetry. There are volumes of medical literature linking any number of these to fertility, health, and a list of genetic qualities all in the name of biological impulses. But once you realize all this is quantifiable, that intimates that there is a perfect score. While there are perhaps thousands of attractive women in the world, perfect is currently defined as Scarlett Johansson.
She is shapely and stunningly gorgeous in a way that makes her dangerous in person. At a distance beauty like that is unattainable and therefore harmless and unobtrusive, but in person it’s possibly lethal. It would feel like Amrish Puri reached through your ribs and tore out your burning, still beating heart. Her immediate presence could kill a man. You shouldn’t meet beauty like this in the flesh. It’s safer behind the movie screen, inside the cathode ray tube and from the convex side of the speaker cone.
This is the most difficult review I’ve ever written. Each time I attempted to listen to the music I was distracted. I attempted to concentrate on the breathy vocals, on legitimate comparisons to Tom Waits’ original works and on the production works of David Andrew Sitek. But each time I put pen to page images would invade my mind: Scarlet Johansson half-naked on the cover of Vanity Fair. The opening scene of Lost in Translation. That Allure Magazine spread she did in 2006 that made me black out briefly.
I know the album exists but I can’t hear it. When I press play I am visited by visions. I see the towel scene in A Love Song for Bobby Long and that criminally hot scene in Match Point. She is without a doubt one of the finest women ever to walk the face of the earth. Her general avoidance of screen nudity gives her an air of class and integrity that’s all the more appealing. Who am I to judge her? Tom Waits is as ugly as a pug dog. I’ll judge him. David Andrew Sitek makes everything he touches sound like TV on the Radio. I’ll judge his incapable ass.
Tom Waits has a voice so basso, so gravelly it sounds like his vocal chords were removed with a soldering iron and replaced with a Mail Pouch tobacco tin, attached to his neck with a couple pop rivets. There is no possibility whatsoever that the smooth, flawless voice of a svelte young actress could emulate this. She doesn’t try. She sings from the bottom of her register, sounding like a small child impersonating daddy. It’s earnest and endearing. It makes moments smooth as honey but without substance without stamina. Synthesizer noises and reverb soaked samples loop and blunder around her unadorned voice like a rainstorm of dogshit. The album gathers nothing and goes nowhere -- I blame Sitek. It can’t be Scarlett’s fault. She’s perfect.
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