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Shiina Ringo is no longer Japan’s answer to Courtney Love, as E!Online stated back in 2000.

No. She’s now Japan’s answer to the Flaming Lips.

On first listen, it’s easy to be blown away by the magnitude of Shiina’s fourth album, Karuki Zaamen Kurinohana. Everything is fair game — traditional Japanese instruments, found sounds, strings and lots of distortion.

But it’s hard to shake the feeling there’s something familiar about it, something precedented about the way Ringö-chan weaves dreamy symphonies with rumbling rock beats.

And it has been done before — with the Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin back in 1999 and again in 2001 with Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. (And again this year with The Delgados’ Hate and at any time with any number of Mercury Rev albums.)

But Shiina isn’t merely following in Dave Fridmann’s footsteps — she’s upping the fucking ante.

Karuki Zaamen Kurinohana goes far beyond weaving orchestral textures into pop songs. The rock band becomes the orchestra.

Shiina has always possessed a penchant for heaping layers upon layers of sound in her music. This album is no different, but the sonic pallete from which she draws is far broader.

In the opening track “Shuukyoo” alone, listeners can expect to hear a full-size orchestra, a complement of Japanese koto, tortured guitars, sitar, mandolin, drum samples and a thundering drum kit.

“Doppelganger” starts off with the minimal textures of Björk’s Vespertine-era work, only to be disrupted midway by a manic double-time beat.

“Yattsuke Shigoto”, which appeared as a rocker on the single box set Zechoshuu, turns into movie musical number complete with a disco beat. Meanwhile, the human beat box on “Torikoshi Kuroo” gets an intermitent rude awakening by a full band.

The album loses steam when it ventures into more standard arrangements. “Okonomi de” and “Ishiki” may have set out to ground Karuki Zaamen Kurinohana from its more indulgent moments, but instead, they deflate the momentum established in the first half of the album.

Thankfully, Shiina reclaims her eclecticism on the concluding track, “Sooretsu”, perhaps the best song to sum up the album. It starts off with a nice, rhythmic feel but concludes with a grandiose organ straight off the Akira Symphonic Suite.

It’s difficult not to put Karuki Zaamen Kurinohana on repeat. The album offers so much sonically, it would take all year to digest it. The heap of accolades rained on the likes of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and Wilco’s Yankee Foxtrot Hotel seem pretty pale by comparrison.

Dave Fridmann and Wayne Coyne — take note. (And get your buddies in Number Girl to hook you up.)

Cover albums are tricky.

Not only must musicians respect the spirit of a song’s original performance, they also have to inject something of their own muse into it.

Good cover albums (Bill Frisell, Have a Little Faith) strike the right balance, while bad ones (Duran Duran, Thank You) end up smearing the reputation of both tributor and tributee.

Nearly a year after giving birth to her son, Shiina Ringo eases her way back into the hyper-productive Japanese music scene with her own cover album, Utaite Myoori. (Or, “Singer’s luck”.)

Shiina has cultivated a reputation for being an in-your-face rocker. She doesn’t fear banging tone clusters on an introspective piano ballad (“Tokiga Boosoosuru”) any more than wailing over a heavy metal guitar riff (“Identity”).

So it’s both surprising and typical for Shiina’s cover album to cut a wide swath of musical styles: Edith Piaf, Andy Williams, the Beatles, Franz Schubert.

Just how well does can one singer interpret Marilyn Monroe and a Japanese lullaby? Pretty well, as it turns out.

Although Utaite Myoori clocks in at 67 minutes, Shiina saw fit to split the album into two discs, one helmed by a different producer and performed by a distinct band.

Each disc is named after the person who arranged it — the “Mori-pact disc” by Mori Toshiyuki, the “Kame-pact disc” by Kameda Seiji.

Shiina was wise to keep the work of these two arrangers separate — like the album covers, they’re as different as night and day.

Fans will probably warm up to the “Kame-pact disc” more easily. Kameda worked with Shiina on her previous albums, and the performances he brings out of the band fits well with what’s gone before.

Compared to the “Mori-pact disc”, however, Kameda and Gyakutai Glycogen (the house band for that disc) deliver the most fiery performances.

Shiina sounds like blues mama on “Shiroi Kohato”, while the guitar work on the Beatles’ “Yer Blues” could be charitably described as wondefully chaotic.

Andy Williams’ “More” transforms into a space-age cabaret song, borrowing a few arrangement tricks from Shiina’s own “Yokoshitsu”. Even the unlikely cover of Monroe’s “I Wanna Be Loved By You” feels organic.

The most relevatory performance is Shiina’s duet with SPITZ’s Kusano Masamune. Kusano, who’s wonderful voice is often backed by jangly guitars, sounds at home in front of Kameda’s screaming axeslingers.

Although the “Mori-pact” disc isn’t bad per se, it doesn’t seem to possess the kind of passion of the “Kame-pact” disc.

Shiina’s duet with Utada Hikaru on “I Won’t Last a Day Without You” feels labored. The cold electronic arrangement of “Jazz a Go Go” seems a bit too stiff for the song’s need to swing.

Shiina does tackle “Kareha” (a.k.a. “Autumn Leaves”) with a very tangible sensuality, and her performance of “Komoriuta” is beautifully sparse.

Taken as a whole, Utaite Myoori is pretty impressive. Shiina navigates multiple languages, styles and idioms with forcefullness and ease. She has no qualms about shaping other people’s music into her own, and she makes it work well.

Whatever you do, don’t press the random button while listening to this album.

And if you just happen to have acquired Shouso Strip through file sharing, don’t just start playing tracks randomly.

Shiina Ringo’s second album is an epic work full of strange effects, sudden starts and stops, plus lots and lots of studio tricks. It’s also a highly structured album that only makes sense when heard from start to finish.

Taken individually, the tracks on Shouso Strip could be mistaken as a whole lot of fancy stuff on the surface with little depth. After all, if a song were really that good, it would stand on its own stripped-down, right?

Wrong.

Shouso Strip goes beyond just a collection of 13 good songs. Each track works well with others, and in some cases, they need each other.

By itself, “Stoicism” is a passable, quirky novelty, but taken in context of its preceeding songs, the head-banging “Identity” and the grunge-y blues of “Tsumi to Batsu”, it sets up momentum for the straight-forward rocker of “Tsuki Ni Makeinu.”

The dischordant intro of “Benkai Debussy” sounds alien without the prepared piano conclusion of “Yokushitsu.” And the sudden cut at the end of “Sakana” would make no sense without the distorted drums of “Byoshou Public” to cut it off.

It’s this interplay between the songs that makes Shouso Strip an addictive album. Play it again and again, and the aural roller coaster Shiina has created takes more twists and turns with each subsequent listen.

While her debut album, Muzai Moratorium, showcased the strength of Shiina’s songwriting, Shouso Strip demonstrates her ability to compose.

Very few women rockers, including ones in America, achieve the kind of confrontational artistry Shiina Ringo regularly produces. E!Online’s comparrisons to Courtney Love — whom Ringo mentions along with Kurt Cobain in the lyrics of the album’s centerpiece, “Gips” — are somewhat off-the-mark.

Shiina isn’t afraid to be challenging or weird, and Shouso Strip is both pleasantly.

What if Alanis Morissette sang in Japanese and numbered Stevie Wonder as one of her songwriting influences? Don’t imagine — Shiina Ringo pretty much does that already.

Oh c’mon — Alanis and Stevie? On paper, it looks the musical equivalent of the bride of Frankenstein, but Shiina pulls off the combination without a hitch.

Shiina takes the big, rawking guitars of Jagged Little Pill and filters it through Wonder’s sense of funk. “Marunouchi Sadistic,” the third track on Ringö’s debut Muzai Moratorium, exemplifies the formula. She even preserves Wonder’s harmonica without making it sound as sacchrine as it usually does.

At various points, Shiina departs from this basic rock-funk formula to present more sonically oblique fare. On “Koufukuron(etsurakuhen),” she’s positively punk, and on “Shido to Hakuchuumu,” she even channels Björk.

While it’s not unusual for Japanese vocalists to sing through their nose, Shiina’s technique makes her sound just like Everyone’s Favorite Canadian with a tad more helium. Nowhere is the comparrison more aparent than on “Kokode Kiss Shite.”

What results is a strangely enjoyable album of funky Japanese rock music that doesn’t take its funkiness too gravely.