The premiere of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland has come and gone and people’s opinions on it are pretty set. (As if they weren’t already before anyone had even seen it.) As much as I liked the movie, I just can’t get behind the companion CD that came out with it called Almost Alice, filled with songs “inspired” by the new film and featuring the likes of Avril Lavigne, The All-American Rejects, Metro Station, Tokio Hotel, and Kerli. Not good—not good at all. Or, to put it more bluntly, off with their heads!
But don’t fret! This is actually the exception in a long history of excellent albums inspired by Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. It was hard to narrow this list down to 10—and the non-album artist Pogo, who makes breathtakingly lovely compositions entirely out of audio bits from the Disney movie adaptation, cannot go without mention—but I hope you enjoy this cross-section.
Chick Corea—The Mad Hatter
The listener is greeted with a terrifying picture of the artist dressed as the titular character: his hat looks red, but his puffy shirt and harem pants are in those indescribable ’70s colours that we no longer have names for. And yet once you get past that, you’ll find a lovely jazz fusion album (not always an oxymoron), embellished liberally with Corea playing five kinds of keyboard instruments, sometimes seemingly at the same time.
David Del Tredici—Alice Symphony
The contemporary composer draws from the Alice well time and again—he also wrote two operas about her, Child Alice and Final Alice—but this remains his best work. Complicated to the extent that it couldn’t be performed until two decades after he first wrote it, this “symphony” constantly shifts from dream to nightmare and back again. Sometimes, lullaby melodies drift down over folk ensemble pluckings; sometimes a soprano is shouting into a megaphone while sirens and theremins wail in the background.
Forever Slave—Alice’s Inferno
This Spanish “gothic rock band with a female singer,” as their website proudly proclaims, made their debut with this concept album. The number of works about Alice that take place in her adolesence—committed, of course, to a mental asylum and descending into a hellish new version of Wonderland—are so numerous that they’ve transcended cliché to become a genre in and of themselves. This is one of the best examples, cleverly fusing the idea with Dante’s Inferno. It’s exactly the melodramatic delight you’d expect from their description of it: “Suicide, violence, love, dark atmospheres, the lost paradise of drugs, madness, sickness, and the most pure Romanticism philosophies are mixed in this CD…”
Irving Fine—Three Choruses From Alice in Wonderland
Another American composer enamoured with Alice in Wonderland, Fine wrote two sets of three choruses in the ’40s and ’50s. When listened to in conjunction with Del Tredici’s work, they’re like the Tenniel illustrations to the mass of Carroll nonsense: seemingly proper and serene, but perhaps even more unsettling in their precision.
Randy Greif—Alice in Wonderland
Think Joanna Newsom was overindulgent in releasing a triple album? Lend your ears to this five-disc, 50-track, six-hour monster. Relentlessly experimental soundscapes sound like the Duchess put the original texts into her pepper grinder and sneezed them out again and again.
Colin Hare—March Hare
It’s understandable how much music based on Carroll’s work is unfailingly challenging to listen to—he does, after all, inspire people to be creative and uncompromising like few authors can, giving them the shield of “nonsense” that can be used to justify just about anything. Colin Hare, however, went against the grain and turned out a marvellously sunny ’70s country pop album, without any of the madness of his namesake.
Nolwenn Leroy—Le Cheshire Cat et Moi
As much as people respect how terrifying Wonderland can be, there seems to be an equally strong compulsion to make it cute. But who can complain when adorable French lounge pop is coming out of your speakers? Put this on and the only thing left of you will be your grin.
QueenAdreena—Drink Me
Speaking of cuteness and terror, this is the album that best mixes the two. The lead singer, KatieJane Garside, can coo like a little pixie or scream like a Gorgon. Her wounded delivery, in combination with grungy guitars and fraying, multi-layered production (are those music boxes?) make this addictively listenable and one of my favourites of the bunch.
Chris Vrenna—American McGee’s Alice
The soundtrack to the horror computer game of the same name (put this under the “Alice in an asylum” genre), this is simply a marvellous album and one of the very first I ever bought with my own money. It sounds like it’s piped out of a haunted Victorian nursery—pure evil, yet affectingly beautiful. My 12-year-old self had good taste!
Tom Waits—Alice
Tom Waits is one of the living gods of music, and there’s no question in my mind that this is his best album, and one of my favourites of all time. His is a desolate, malicious vision of Wonderland born out of the narrator’s obsessions with the titular girl. Yet there are just enough hints of redemption at the end to keep you coming back down the rabbit hole for more.
