Aimee Mann

★★★ Queens Of The Summer Hotel SUPEREGO. CD/DL/LP

Music to stage adaptation of Girl, Interrupted and 10th LP by peerless singer-songwriter.

Susanna Kaysen’s 1993 memoir, Girl, Interrupted, an account of her late-’60s hospitalisation with borderline personality disorder, was first adapted in a 1999 film starring Winona Ryder. Directed by James Mangold, the movie inhabits a shifting nebulous space between sanity and madness, order and chaos, a landscape not dissimilar from that charted in Aimee Mann’s own writing career, most recently on her Grammy-winning 2017 LP, unambiguously titled Mental Illness. For this stage adaptation of Girl, Interrupted, Mann is working with Paul Bryan’s string arrangements, triple-time waltz patterns and narrative rhythms somewhere between classical lieder and the modern recitative. As such, the delivery can often feel eerily dreamlike or hauntedly disconnected. Mann’s voice remains exquisite, her lyrics cinematically vivid, often painfully so, but the album possesses a chimerical looseness, a fuzzy aimless drift that is simultaneously haunting and somniferous. Andrew Male ascending into Hazell Dean giddiness. The extremes work better still, be it Cyrus’s eyebrow-raisingly raw trawl through Metallica’s Nothing Else Matters or the vocal and piano pyrotechnics which course through Young Thug & Nicki Minaj’s Always Love You. John Aizlewood