reviews dump: tori amos
Tori Amos & Ann Powers
Released in the US just prior to her eighth studio album, The Beekeeper, this fascinatingly unconventional semi-autobiography did what few Tori Amos releases since Under The Pink have been able – it failed to split the critics. It even made the New York Times Bestseller List. Having finally found a publisher in the UK, where her fanbase is slenderer yet unremittingly fervent, ‘Piece By Piece’ at last hits the bookshelves in June in support of the European leg of her Original Sinsuality Tour. Regardless of whether you have an appreciation for Tori Amos the performer, Tori Amos as author brings to the fore her enviable intelligence, quick wit and literate, piercing insight and as such commands respect even from those who would give it begrudgingly. Co-written with renowned New York music journalist Ann Powers this is no mere memoir, for Amos has always had a keen eye for a concept – her last few albums have come with buckets of convolutions. With a nonlinear narrative to match the most ambitious writers of fiction, Amos and Powers construct a verbal collage of various conversations (including contributions from Amos’s husband, friends, touring bandmates, chef and security guard among others) that are woven through eight hefty chapters.
Each chapter is overseen by an archetype of mythological or religious legend, including Amos’s constant inspiration and “erotic muse”, Mary Magdelene. Amos has been trying to reunite the spiritual and the sexual aspects of womanhood since her debut album Little Earthquakes tore down gender barriers and kicked open the floodgates for similarly confessional songwriting. Years before ‘The Da Vinci Code’ popularised the gnostic gospel of Mary Magdelene, Amos has given voice to the much maligned biblical figure, but never more so than in ‘Marys Of The Sea’, one of the standout songs from The Beekeeper. This song and many others are discussed and abstracted upon in ‘song canvasses’ scattered throughout the book.
The motherhood chapter (overseen by Demeter, the Greek goddess of harvest and fertility), which tells of Amos’s long battle to successfully carry a child that finally ended in 2000 with the birth of her daughter Natashya Lorién, is guaranteed to hit a nerve. Her disarmingly frank account of each of her three miscarriages is both harrowing and brave. Equally engaging is her tale of how these health problems contributed to the souring of her relationship with Atlantic Records. That, and a brazen publicity scam on their part, were the final straw for Amos who told them where to stick it. Unfortunately, she still had three albums to turn in to fulfil the terms of her contract, albums which Atlantic were determined not to promote in order to effectively ruin her career, an effort in which they clearly failed.
The interplay between Amos and Powers helps to keep the notoriously wordy songwriter on track, although some passages are a little hard going. If you can forgive Amos her small indulgences, there is much to be enjoyed here, even for those with just a passing interest. It is an utterly unprecendented opportunity to look so far into the mind of one of the most enigmatic artists of our time.
Alan Pedder
Tori Amos
For each night of the tour, fans have been able to request covers via Amos’ official website, resulting in performances ranging from the obvious to the outrageous. Tonight was the turn of George Michael’s ‘Father Figure and Madonna’s ‘Like A Prayer’, both of which have been played before but sounded all the more polished for it. The former especially hit all the buttons that Michael could only strive for. In a setlist drawing heavily from her first three records and this year’s The Beekeeper, several of her albums, including the sublime Scarlet’s Walk, were sadly neglected. However, a surprise rendition of Lloyd Cole & The Commotions’ ‘Rattlesnakes’ from her contract-fulfilling covers album Strange Little Girls, seemed unusually at home in the two-hour set.
In complete contrast, Amos invited onto the stage a choir of six gospel singers to add a welcome sense of fun to the proceedings, unique to this performance. The live debut of the six-minute soulful epic ‘Witness’ was the highlight of the night, though the bizarrely fluid boogie-woogie of empowerment anthem ‘Hoochie Woman’ was another real treat. Only ‘Jamaica Inn’ floundered as Amos switched between her beloved Bösendorfer and Hammond organ a few too many times, slowing the song considerably. Still, Amos’s prodigious talent and mastery of her instrument never fails to amaze and confirms her singular status.
The only true gripe was that, while Amos is undoubtedly a musical auteur, she fared less well visually with some of the worst lighting projections in memory. Certainly she’s no Björk in that department and they added little to the experience. But with a performer so compelling and music this affecting, who really needs such trifling distractions?
Alan Pedder
Tori Amos
My first encounter with Tori Amos on video was a shot of her hurtling towards a giant spider’s web in the abstract European promo for ‘Cornflake Girl’ (featured here as a bonus extra). Ironically, the striking red hair that hallmarks almost all of her other videos and inspires the name of this collection was indistinguishable to me as I marvelled at this monochrome masterpiece. Okay, well, in hindsight maybe it isn’t really a masterpiece, but then how many music videos are? It’s an inherently silly medium. Which is why it’s so refreshing to come across an artist willing to take a few risks and sometimes even embrace the silliness of it. In fact, most of the videos included here are, in their varying ways, even more remarkable than the cut I first fell in love with, but the point is the same: whichever avenue you take into the wonderful world of Amos’s visual output, it is likely to be a memorable one.
Her first video, ‘Silent All These Years’, is another bold affair and one that has provided most people with their first and most lasting impression of Amos – also becoming the source of the cover shot for her debut album. It comprises mostly of Tori, a white background, a wooden box, some bright red lipstick and those famous red tresses. Simple yet compelling, it works because it allows Amos to breathe. An artist with lesser presence wouldn’t be comfortable laying themselves open to such close scrutiny, yet Amos does it consistently. No matter what guise she takes, Amos never seems overwhelmed. You find yourself believing in her, whether trapped on display in a gallery window, being dragged from a burning building or bound and running away from an unidentified captor as we see in ‘Spark’, possibly the most gripping video I’ve ever laid eyes on. The results are exhilarating.
What hits you is the sheer variety of ideas that Amos and her collaborators seem to have. The sequencing of the videos contributes to this diversity, juxtaposing selections from different points in her fifteen-year career. It would have been silly to lump together the low-budget Little Earthquakes videos at the start of the collection. Whilst each video is its own entity and should be considered as such, the early videos are essentially different sides to the same box that Amos first rolled onto our screens in, none of them quite building on the stark imagery of her first promo. Instead they are much more entertaining and unique when dotted around the collection, reminding us that her vision has been uncompromising from the start. ‘Winter’ even benefits from being sandwiched between the more subversive and stylised ‘A Sorta Fairytale’ (featuring Oscar-winning actor Adrien Brody in perhaps the weirdest allegorical love story ever) and ‘Spark’. Elsewhere, the student-like experimentation of ‘China’ segues perfectly into the more adventurous ‘Raspberry Swirl’ and ‘Talula’ promos. In fact, the early videos are some of the most enjoyable to watch as Amos and director Cindy Palmano play around with the constrictions of the medium.
The music, as always, is simply outstanding. In fact, had 2003’s ‘reconditioned’ retrospective ‘Tales Of A Librarian’ been conceived and presented similarly to this it may have proved a greater testament to her talents. This has obviously been a labour of love for Amos and, overall, it’s a very well packaged and comprehensive collection. A couple of videos are conspicuous by their absence, however. One can only presume that contractual issues prevented the inclusion of the promo for her Stranglers cover, ‘Strange Little Girl’, as it is one of her best. The missing ‘Glory Of The 80s’ video is more of a mystery, although the likely reason for its omission is that it just didn’t make the grade – it’s a video with a nice idea that wasn’t quite realised. Still, do a Google search for either of these and you’ll find them in seconds. As for extras, the personal commentary on each video is a very nice and often hilarious touch, allowing us an insight into the making of and ideas behind the clips.
Matthew Hall
Tori Amos
Should anyone have any doubts about what a commanding and provocative artist Tori Amos remains, they will surely be put to rest by these officially sanctioned ‘bootlegs’. Recorded during this year’s solo Original Sinsuality and Summer Of Sin tours, five of these double CDs were initially released exclusively online, and have now been packaged together as a comprehensive boxset (along with an extra bonus 2CD recording), offering yet another fix for Amos’s followers. Indeed, 2005 has been an amazingly fertile year for Amos artistically. With another brilliant studio album in The Beekeeper, an absorbing and stylistically innovative memoir in ‘Piece By Piece’, and now these releases, she’s in danger of spoiling us rotten. On these discs, culled from dates in LA, Chicago, Denver, Manchester, London and Boston, we find her singing (better than ever) songs both old and new, rarities and a series of creative covers – sufficient material to keep both diehard enthusiasts and recent converts occupied for months. If you were at these shows (and surely not even Amos’s most devoted fans could have attended all of them) then these CDs offer a wonderful memento of some amazing musical moments. If you weren’t, it’s a chance to catch up on some of what you missed and to savour the enthralling experience that is Amos’s live show.
Another reason is that she’s amassed a back catalogue that ranks among the greatest in contemporary music, and which provides a very rich resource for her to mine in live performances. Aside from her undebatable instrumental prowess, Amos has always been a terrific writer of songs that can be equal parts tender and savage, raw and healing, sad and sensual, and both her oldest and newest material gets a workout here. Highlights from her own repertoire include ‘Little Amsterdam’, sounding spookier than ever with its organ accompaniment; the baroquely beautiful ‘Yes, Anastasia’; the startling ‘Father Lucifer’; the buoyant ‘Take To The Sky’; the ever-green ‘Winter’, ‘Silent All These Years’ and ‘Tear In Your Hand’; and the majestic ‘Cool On Your Island’. It’s fascinating, too, to hear new songs such as ‘Sweet The Sting’ and ‘The Power Of Orange Knickers’ stripped down to just keyboard and voice, and in the process sounding more themselves than ever.
It should be noted that there is, inevitably, quite a bit of repetition of material over the discs. ‘Original Sinsuality’ kicks off every show, and we get several ‘Jamaica Inn’s, ‘Space Dog’s and ‘Parasol’s when we might wish for a ‘Pretty Good Year’ or a ‘Northern Lad’. But, as Amos would no doubt argue, ‘Parasol’ in Chicago on April 15th is not ‘Parasol’ in Denver on April 19th, and the duplication of material does offer a valuable opportunity to compare different versions. Amos is such a spontaneous, in-the-moment performer that she never delivers identikit readings of her songs anyway, and the chance for listeners to play “compare and contrast” is one of the many pleasures offered here. Collectively then, these discs further demonstrate Amos’s sheer mastery of her art. From first note to last, you’re confronted with the slightly overwhelming sensation of hearing a performer at the very peak of her powers. While some critics continue to recycle tired complaints about ‘abstruse lyrics’ and ‘excessive ambition’, Amos just gets on with making some of the most adventurous, intelligent and extraordinary music out there. Long may she continue.
Alex Ramon
Tori Amos
The release of this monumental compilation just three years after Tales Of A Librarian suggests that the latter ‘best of’ did not entirely satisfy Amos’s desire for a comprehensive retrospective of her career. It’s hardly surprising; having produced a series of stunning, epic records which have each rehabilitated and transformed the notion of the concept album, Amos must surely feel a certain amount of frustration that her extraordinary music is still frequently dismissed by much of the mainstream British music press as the work of a Kate Bush clone. By now, of course, such accusations just sound plain silly: could an artist really sustain nine albums and a succession of Odysseyan tours (not to mention survive a major record company scrap) by simply ‘copying’ another one? Hardly.
Nonetheless, the persistence of these kinds of comments points to a worrying critical tendency to dismiss certain female artists on entirely superficial grounds of similarity. While identikit male guitar bands and warbling R&B wannabes merrily rip each other off without comment or censure, some critics’ indignant response to Amos’s work – “We’ve already got one like that!” – sadly reflects a refusal to engage with another complex, uncompromising (and resolutely female) artistic vision. Such a reaction seems both glaringly unfair as well as inaccurate. After all, surface similarities notwithstanding, Bush and Amos have never been all that alike in performance style, lyrical content or career philosophy; it’s about as easy to envisage Bush embarking on a 200-date tour as it is to imagine Amos writing a rhapsodic ode to light and birdsong and getting Rolf Harris to sing on it. Fortunately, Amos’s heartening response to such blinkered critical diminishment has been to keep her focus firmly placed upon her music, as vividly demonstrated by A Piano, a beautifully packaged collection that fully confirms her singular status. This boxset – which, in a stroke of design genius, is shaped to resemble the keyboard of one of Amos’s treasured Bösendorfers – contains five discs and 86 tracks but still only manages to scratch the surface of her brilliant career.
That said, even the most ardent of Toriphiles may approach this release with a mixture of delight and trepidation. Since Amos’s records are so intricately worked out, so thematically cohesive, do we really want another collection that inevitably distorts their immaculate sequencing and, by so doing, risks muddying our memories of the original albums? The fact is that a collection such as this one can never hope to please all of the people all of the time, and once you’ve recovered from the shock of some truly questionable omissions (no ‘Northern Lad’! no ‘Talula’! no ‘Scarlet’s Walk’, fer chrissake!) and the not overly generous supply of new and rare material (just seven previously unreleased tracks in all, along with some alternate mixes, demos and a healthy assortment of B-sides), it’s time to relax and savour what is here, as well as the fact that Amos has been able to produce the collection and oversee the selection process herself. In her own words: “A lot of times you’re a grand- mother when you get that opportunity to do the boxset – or you’re dead. To be current and creating, alongside putting a retrospective together, is an opportunity that you don’t always have in life.” For Amos, this collection marks “the end of an era” and it testifies to both the stylistic diversity of her output and the consistency of its quality. If her music is intricately bound up in your existence and identity then the experience of listening to A Piano is rather like flicking through a book of your own life, and discovering that, while a few crucial chapters have gone missing, they’ve been replaced by others that you’d forgotten about and a few that you didn’t know were there.
It will come as no surprise that no inclusions from Amos’s ill-starred Y Kant Tori Read days are made; instead, the first four discs trace a broadly chronological path through her post-1990 career, taking in everything from the bare-bones intimacy of Little Earthquakes, the dynamic rock of From The Choirgirl Hotel, the swirling electronica of To Venus & Back and the widescreen panoramas of the mighty Scarlet’s Walk. Disc A is something of a settling of scores, presenting an extended and rearranged version of Little Earthquakes that more accurately reflects Amos’s original vision of the album. It’s a bold (and possibly foolhardy) move to re-order a record that, for most of us, was perfect in its original incarnation, and no doubt many admirers of the album will feel a certain amount of ambivalence about Amos’s decision to do this. Happily, the re-sequencing does not interfere with the impact of the album, which still sounds incredibly powerful, retaining its ability to chill, inspire, shock and console in equal measure. And it’s unquestionably a bonus to have B-sides the likes of ‘Upside Down’, ‘Flying Dutchman’, ‘Take To The Sky’ and ‘Sweet Dreams’ collected together in one place on this disc.
Discs B-D mix tracks from Under The Pink, Boys For Pele, Choirgirl, Venus, Scarlet’s Walk and The Beekeeper with pit stops for the rare and unreleased material, while Disc E collates a selection of her B-sides and demos. (A typically well-produced booklet offers photos, background detail and commentaries on many of the inclusions.) As on Tales Of A Librarian, some of the album tracks have been subtly (and in some cases, very subtly) remixed from the original versions; in Amos’s terms, these are acts of “refurbishment” designed to prevent her earlier work from sounding dated. The most noticeable tweaking occurs on the dense choirgirl tracks: violent guitar stabs and all manner of unidentifiable sinister noises add new layers of atmosphere to ‘Cruel’ and ‘iieee’, while the Kurzweil and sighing pedal steel on ‘Playboy Mommy’ are given extra space. All the remixes are effective, however, contributing a crisper and cleaner sound to the songs.
If last year’s Official Bootleg series demonstrated Amos’s ability to command an audience with ‘just’ her voice and exquisite keyboard skills, these discs remind of her equally dextrous control of studio toys and band dynamics, not to mention the evolution of her singing and the complex beauty of her songwriting. As her frames of reference have broadened, taking her music ever deeper into history (or herstory), politics, myth and legend, Amos has learned how to utilise a select group of musicians – principally, drummer Matt Chamberlain and bassist Jon Evans – who share her sense of studio meticulousness. The opportunity that this boxset offers to trace her creative arc is genuinely thrilling, and it may surprise some listeners that the noisiest, rockiest songs here are among the most piercingly effective. But the constant component of her work is, of course, the piano, and these discs attest to her consistent and creative reinvention of that instrument as a vital and versatile part of the pop-rock idiom.
There’s always something new to uncover in Amos’s songs and each listener will of course have their own favourite (re-)discoveries as they dive into this collection. But it’s the new material that most fans will make a beeline for first, and the previously unreleased tracks are as brilliant as anything she’s ever done. The tense ‘Take Me With You’ (which Amos began in 1990 and finally completed this year) is an immediate highlight, a seamless merging of her earliest and most recent sensibilities. ‘Walk To Dublin (Sucker Reprise)’ is a captivating slice of harpsichord-driven Pele-era madness, while the Beekeeper reject ‘Not David Bowie’ rocks and rumbles with a blistering mix of Hammond organ and clavinet that has to be heard to be believed. Meanwhile, ‘Marys Of The Sea’ gets supplemented by a cheeky ‘intro jam’ which finds Amos scatting and improvising over funky piano, bass and drums. “I’ve got to face some kind of evil tomorrow,” she sings, rather cheerfully. Elsewhere, ‘Ode To My Clothes’ manages to be both playful and desolate and ‘Dolphin Song’ is simply mesmerising.
Each of these tracks demonstrates her amazing ability to take a song through diverse emotions, metres and moods. With her richly expressive vocals, Amos can turn a tender ballad of love betrayed savage with a simple shift in intonation or a casually dropped profanity – listen to the eruption of anger that spills into the bridge of ‘Take Me With You’ or the sudden Southern twist she puts on the “daughter of a preacher man” lyric in ‘Dolphin Song’. Her vocalisations are peerless in their expressiveness and unpredictability. Meanwhile, intricate temporal shifts in the music are matched and enhanced by startling lyrical juxtapositions: ‘Sister Janet’ finds her “slipping the blade in the marmalade”; ‘Beulah Land’ has her requesting “religion, and a lobotomy”; on ‘Honey’ she’s trying to “bribe the undertaker” and confronting a man who only “liked [his] babies tight.” (Listening to these lyrics you may find yourself wondering whether it can be a mere coincidence that Amos was born in the year Sylvia Plath died.)
From moment to moment, you never know in what direction her songs are going to take you: the nine-minute ‘Zero Point’ spends a few seconds masquerading as a delicate piano ballad before mutating into an epic of programmed beats and distorted guitar. Elsewhere, vaudeville touches merge with classical flourishes, furious harpsichord joins with church bells. As she put it so memorably in her semi-autobiography ‘Piece By Piece’: “Some days life can feel pretty normal…then there are other days that make you think you’ve walked into something sinister, like a Hermann Hesse novel.” Her songs contain and convey that breadth of feeling and experience, allowing the sacred and profane, the oblique and the brutally direct, the mythic and the colloquial, to occupy the same breathing space. Few musicians have the capacity to channel such calm and frenzy, either live or on record. And even fewer can match her ability to combine intellectual rigorousness with visceral emotion. But, for all her intensity, A Piano exposes an incredible amount of humour in her work, black and otherwise.
Still, it’s a genuine shame that none of her brilliant covers are featured, no ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ or ‘Angie’, and nothing from her bracingly subversive (and criminally underrated) Strange Little Girls album – who wouldn’t kill to hear her rendition of Public Enemy’s ‘Fear Of A Black Planet’? Anything, in fact, would be preferable to the Armand van Helden dance remix of ‘Professional Widow’, which, as on Tales…, sounds like a garish intrusion here. However, its appearance is compensated for by the inclusion of a blood-curdlingly intense live version of the song elsewhere. Moreover, the B-side disc yields a spectacular sequence of songs, including an inspired deconstruction of ‘Home On The Range’ (which clearly anticipates Scarlet’s Walk‘s investigation of Native American history), the most poignant version of ‘This Old Man’ you’re ever likely to hear and the rare ‘Merman’, one of her most haunting compositions. The demo medley is also a wonderful addition that bravely showcases works in progress; it’s fascinating to hear the complex narrative of ‘A Sorta Fairytale’ being developed, while on ‘Playboy Mommy’ she truly sounds as if she’s in the process of channelling the song from another dimension.
As with all of Amos’s work, thought, care and an almost visionary quality of attention to detail have gone into the compilation of A Piano. This remarkable collection confirms her genius, contextualising an extensive body of work that, spiritually speaking, owes as much to The Beatles, Led Zeppelin or Nirvana as Kate Bush and yet retains its utter uniqueness. Along with last year’s Official Bootleg series, the autobiography and this year’s ‘Fade To Red’ video collection, A Piano offers another opportunity to explore the depths in Amos’s music as we await the next step on her journey (a new studio album is due next spring). It’s a pricey purchase, to be sure, but think of it as a spiritual investment…you’ll be listening to these songs forever.
Alex Ramon
Tori Amos
Last year’s colossal A Piano boxset was similarly underrated (not to mention under-reviewed): the collection functioned as a timely reminder of the singularity of Amos’s vision, but was sadly overlooked by all but the die-hards. Alas, it seems that her new album, American Doll Posse, has failed to fully revive her commercial fortunes either, at least on this side of the Atlantic, debuting at a lowly number 50 on the UK album chart in the week that saw new albums by Ne-Yo and Natasha Bedingfield go Top 10. It’s probably best not to linger over the cultural implications of this though, as it has subsequently emerged that the low chart placing was due to a particularly bizarre bit of regulation which barred sales of the album’s special edition from inclusion in the count. (Beck’s The Information suffered the same fate last year.)
Perhaps in witty response to those who complained that The Beekeeper was far too long, Amos here produces an album that is shorter than its predecessor – by less than a minute. Boasting a mammoth 23 tracks, American Doll Posse tops both Scarlet’s Walk and The Beekeeper for sheer unadulterated epic-ness, while maintaining a rougher, brasher (some might say less subtle) tone. As all interested parties are aware by now, the album’s concept sees Amos continuing her investigation of the possibilities of role-play and character in order to conjure five distinct female personas inspired by the Greek pantheon: Isabel (Artemis), Clyde (Persephone), Santa (Aphrodite), Pip (Athena), and – in a pleasing po-mo touch – Tori (Demeter and Dionysus, no less). These characters are our narrators and guides through the Posse maze – liner notes helpfully identify who’s singing what – sometimes duetting or providing background vocals for each other, and offering their diverse takes on contemporary experience, from the overtly political to the deeply personal.
But leaving aside conceptual befuddlements for the moment (we’ll return to them later, sorry), how does American Doll Posse actually sound? Very good indeed. Fortunately, Amos’s socio-political agenda has not led her to produce the sonic equivalent of a Hélène Cixous essay. Rather, with typical unpredictability, she’s given us a record that is, for the most part, thoroughly accessible: sexy, decadent, slightly disreputable fun. For all the pomposity of her rhetoric, Amos seems fully aware that there’s a great deal of frivolous, high-camp potential to the concept she’s devised, and she appears to be having a very good time exploring it.
Moreover, even with Amos plainly leading the charge as she operates her inimitable keyboard arsenal (Rhodes, Wurlitzer, electric piano, clavichord and mellotron accompany the Bösendorfer this time), Posse is also very much a collaborative work. Across the album Matt Chamberlain’s protean drumming and Jon Evans’s lithe bass join with her to achieve the kind of sustained symbiosis which is only possible after many months of shared live performance. A couple of tracks boast a string quartet arranged with typically exquisite precision by long-time collaborator John Philip Shenale, but the album’s real surprise lies in the contributions of the enigmatic ‘Mac Aladdin’ (recently revealed to be Mark Hawley, aka Mr. Amos), who emerges from the shadows to contribute incendiary electric guitar work throughout. The result is an album that rocks hard; Amos hasn’t got this consistently noisy on record since 1999’s To Venus & Back. That she manages to do so while continuing to engage in an intelligent and literate manner with thorny questions of gender, identity, power and politics suggests something of her achievement here.
Such is Amos’s healthy relationship to her Muse(s) that, barring the occasional strained moment, there’s amazingly little filler on Posse. As far as the major tracks go, things begin to get really interesting as soon as ‘Big Wheel’, an unexpected piece of swaggering honky-tonk that nicely establishes the album’s gender agenda, its brilliant bridge turning on the already-infamous appropriation of an impolite appreciatory acronym. It’s followed by the thumping drums and galloping pianos of Clyde’s delectable ‘Bouncing Off Clouds’, a song that continues the sharp-eyed investigation into “the way we communicate”, which has always been a central theme of Amos’s writing. “Failure to respond worked / I talked, but did you listen?” she enquires, the challenges of human interaction – whether between lovers, enemies or the individual and a perceived Authority – remaining a primary concern throughout the album.
Arriving at the crucial mid-album mark, ‘Body & Soul’ – all clumping percussion, staccato piano and dirty bass – is an electrifying ‘duet’ between Santa and Pip, and one that brilliantly blurs the border between sexy and scary. The pensive, political ‘Father’s Son’ condenses the spectres of a dozen recent ecological disasters into the immortal inquiry “can we blame nature if she’s had enough of us?”, and the elegantly turbulent ‘Code Red’ bathes in an ambience that wouldn’t have seemed out of place on 1998’s From The Choirgirl Hotel. “Do this long enough you get a taste for it,” Amos sings, and the surrounding lyrics are ambiguous enough to suggest that she may have playing music, masturbation or living itself on her mind.
The album proper arguably ends here, but Amos has a trick or two up her sleeve yet. If ‘Posse Bonus’ is the album equivalent of one of those cheeky improv jams that are staples of her live show, then Pip’s ‘Smokey Joe’ and Santa’s ‘Dragon’ are American Doll Posse‘s magnificent encores, the former a deeply disturbing contrapuntal debate about the benefits (or otherwise) of brutal female retribution, the latter a compassionate rebuttal which bravely posits love, not violence, as the answer: “now it has come to light / the Gods they have slipped up / they forgot about the power / of a woman’s love.” It’s an extension of the dispute between these two in ‘Body & Soul’ – in which Santa advised Pip that “these devils of yours, they need love” – and one that attests to the breadth and complexity of Amos’s vision. There’s no sentimentality, no cosiness in her version of female understanding, and ‘Dragon’ – on which it’s the woman who must slay the beast – plays out with ‘Smokey Joe’s assertion that “the annihilating Feminine does not need civilizing” still echoing in your mind.
Lyrically, as some of the previous quotes demonstrate, Amos continues to cut with a very sharp scalpel indeed. If there’s a retro feel to much of the music, her subject matter remains resolutely current and contemporary. Avoiding the fey romanticism and preciousness which mars the work of some of her descendents, and veering ever closer to the complex poetry, her songwriting on Posse retains its thrilling mixture of brutal frankness and hermetic opacity, each track containing some indelible image, some surprising turn of phrase. “Genital panic,” “feeling radical in cotton,” “silken rubber gloves choking his vitriolic tongue,” “a gold star on a gendarme,” “blondes here don’t jump out of cakes,” “working her hell on that red carpet,” “boycotting trends / it’s my new look this season” – Amos is highly allusive but also colloquial, solidly structured yet apparently spontaneous, rarely sloppy or repetitious. Combined with the expressiveness of her vocals, the by now notorious ambiguities of her diction, and her immaculate musicianship, Amos’s impact is often overwhelming.
But the profundity of American Doll Posse ultimately lies in the aspects that may prove most problematic for some listeners: its concept and its scale. “The songs that have been coming to me lately, with their varied points of view, have been helping me to see how many different aspects of the self there are and that there is so much to work with, for each of us, at every stage,” Amos wrote in her conclusion to ‘Piece By Piece’, and this album feels like her practical demonstration of that statement. For what Posse offers the dedicated listener is a truly multi-vocal experience, a composite picture of contemporary American womanhood that is so rich that it ends up surpassing both national and gender specifics. What’s more, the entire album may be interpreted as a celebration of the benefits to be gleaned from looking at the world from multiple and often contradictory viewpoints – a particularly valuable endeavour in this polarised period. “Objectivity,” Isabel’s liner notes tell us, “can only be attained if you are open to another perception, even one that is contrary to your own.”
Accordingly, Amos’s women are not static creations; during the album they change through interaction with each other, their identities blurring and merging and complicating the labels that have been ascribed to them. In some ways, Amos could’ve taken the concept further – how about inviting one of those much-maligned “right-wing Christians” into the Posse? – but, even so, there’s liberation and subversion in the way in which the album tramples across gender stereotypes, locating the strength in Clyde’s vulnerability, the wisdom and potency in Santa’s sexuality, the doubt in Isabel’s political conviction. By the end, on ‘Smokey Joe’, there’s even the suggestion that Pip’s aggression may be turning to equivocation. Against the societal divisions that “pit woman against feminist,” male against female, the political against the personal, Amos constructs a kaleidoscope of paradox and contradiction, of competing and complimentary voices. In the process, what she offers us is nothing less than a guide to the possibility of surmounting repressive binary logic and of working creatively with the “many different aspects of the self” there are.
Between the concept, the blogs, Blaise Reutersward’s spectacular photography and – oh yes – the music itself, American Doll Posse provides sufficient material to sustain a thesis, not a review. Long but never sluggish, dense but never dry, this is the album as artefact – a wide open space for the listener to explore in. Whether it possesses the complete cohesion and control of Scarlet’s Walk is debatable, but, in this era of the short attention span, Amos has once again crafted a work that deliberately thwarts easy consumption, requiring instead a listener’s total sensory engagement, participation, and occasional forbearance. It’s a rare enough event in our culture, and one to be savoured, not scorned. (How often can a major-label musician be accused of indulging themselves with an excess of ideas these days?) To download bits and pieces of this album, to hear a few tracks and rush to snap judgement, seems a betrayal of the dedication and commitment that has gone into its composition. Immersion is the only solution here, and if you don’t have the time or inclination for that – well, new Ne-Yo and Natasha Bedingfield albums await you. But if you’re up for an experience, dive in, and marvel at Amos’s ability to produce yet another vital record that at once reflects and transcends our troubled times.
Vitamin String Quartet
Having tackled the music of an astonishingly diverse selection of artists (everyone from Björk through The Cure to Garth Brooks), and with over 200 releases to its credit, Vitamin Records’ String Quartet Tribute series now brings us a second volume dedicated to the work of Tori Amos, a follow-up to 2001’s generally well-received Precious Things. It’s probably fair to say that most of us have mixed feelings about this series: putting a classical spin on rock music seems a brave but somewhat foolhardy idea, and one which risks turning intense, hard-edged songs into pleasant muzak. However, while this record doesn’t entirely assuage such reservations, it’s a classy effort which serves as a testament both to Amos’s impeccable sense of melody and to the variety and adaptability of her compositions.
While Precious Things concentrated on material from Amos’s first few albums, Pieces takes an impressively broad sweep through her voluminous back catalogue, including songs from each of her studio albums bar Under The Pink and the covers project Strange Little Girls. (In a nice bit of serendipity, Amos herself has employed a string quartet for the first time on her new album American Doll Posse.) Fans will be pleased to discover that many of the song choices are far from obvious, and that some of them are, in fact, wonderfully left-field: it’s a delight to find underrated gems such as ‘Cars & Guitars’, ‘Taxi Ride’ and Tales Of A Librarian‘s ‘Snow Cherries From France’ here, each beautifully performed.
The album has a very good sense of pace and flow and opens, appropriately, with ‘Jackie’s Strength’, that extraordinary amalgam of intimate autobiography and US social history. This version can’t really hope to compete with John Philip Shenale’s sublime string arrangement on the original but it remains an affecting rendition. A playful ‘Sweet The Sting’ and a gracefully mournful ‘China’ are among the other highlights, while ‘Spark’ and ‘Professional Widow’ (yes, really!) manage to retain an amazing amount of the turbulent menace of the originals. ‘Me & A Gun’ – which Amos famously delivered a cappella – is another surprising choice, and one that doesn’t quite come off, but lovely takes on ‘1000 Oceans’ and ‘A Sorta Fairytale’ quickly compensate.
It will come as no surprise that Pieces ultimately fails to fully convey the passion, density and complexity of Amos’s music: how can it without two of the most significant components, that voice and those words? But it’s a worthy collection which offers a fresh perspective on a formidable body of work.
May 30, 2008, 3:32 pm
Filed under: album, back issues, book, film & dvd, live, review | Tags: alan pedder, alex ramon, ann powers, matthew hall, tori amos, vitamin string quartet
Filed under: album, back issues, book, film & dvd, live, review | Tags: alan pedder, alex ramon, ann powers, matthew hall, tori amos, vitamin string quartet
Tori Amos & Ann Powers
Tori Amos: Piece By Piece •••••
Plexus Publishing
Released in the US just prior to her eighth studio album, The Beekeeper, this fascinatingly unconventional semi-autobiography did what few Tori Amos releases since Under The Pink have been able – it failed to split the critics. It even made the New York Times Bestseller List. Having finally found a publisher in the UK, where her fanbase is slenderer yet unremittingly fervent, ‘Piece By Piece’ at last hits the bookshelves in June in support of the European leg of her Original Sinsuality Tour. Regardless of whether you have an appreciation for Tori Amos the performer, Tori Amos as author brings to the fore her enviable intelligence, quick wit and literate, piercing insight and as such commands respect even from those who would give it begrudgingly. Co-written with renowned New York music journalist Ann Powers this is no mere memoir, for Amos has always had a keen eye for a concept – her last few albums have come with buckets of convolutions. With a nonlinear narrative to match the most ambitious writers of fiction, Amos and Powers construct a verbal collage of various conversations (including contributions from Amos’s husband, friends, touring bandmates, chef and security guard among others) that are woven through eight hefty chapters.
Each chapter is overseen by an archetype of mythological or religious legend, including Amos’s constant inspiration and “erotic muse”, Mary Magdelene. Amos has been trying to reunite the spiritual and the sexual aspects of womanhood since her debut album Little Earthquakes tore down gender barriers and kicked open the floodgates for similarly confessional songwriting. Years before ‘The Da Vinci Code’ popularised the gnostic gospel of Mary Magdelene, Amos has given voice to the much maligned biblical figure, but never more so than in ‘Marys Of The Sea’, one of the standout songs from The Beekeeper. This song and many others are discussed and abstracted upon in ‘song canvasses’ scattered throughout the book.
The motherhood chapter (overseen by Demeter, the Greek goddess of harvest and fertility), which tells of Amos’s long battle to successfully carry a child that finally ended in 2000 with the birth of her daughter Natashya Lorién, is guaranteed to hit a nerve. Her disarmingly frank account of each of her three miscarriages is both harrowing and brave. Equally engaging is her tale of how these health problems contributed to the souring of her relationship with Atlantic Records. That, and a brazen publicity scam on their part, were the final straw for Amos who told them where to stick it. Unfortunately, she still had three albums to turn in to fulfil the terms of her contract, albums which Atlantic were determined not to promote in order to effectively ruin her career, an effort in which they clearly failed.
The interplay between Amos and Powers helps to keep the notoriously wordy songwriter on track, although some passages are a little hard going. If you can forgive Amos her small indulgences, there is much to be enjoyed here, even for those with just a passing interest. It is an utterly unprecendented opportunity to look so far into the mind of one of the most enigmatic artists of our time.
Alan Pedder
originally published May 22nd, 2005
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Tori Amos
Live at the Apollo, Hammersmith ••••
June 4th, 2005
Though each of her last few albums have come swaddled in conceptual complexities that would make Nietzsche think twice about indulging, tonight’s stop on Tori Amos’s Original Sinsuality Tour mostly dispenses with the cerebellar workout, leaving room for the levity of her music to truly impress. The sixth-form poetry clunkiness of the moniker aside, this latest tour has been one of the more memorable in recent years and given her the chance to showcase those famous interpretive skills first evidenced by her version of Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’.
For each night of the tour, fans have been able to request covers via Amos’ official website, resulting in performances ranging from the obvious to the outrageous. Tonight was the turn of George Michael’s ‘Father Figure and Madonna’s ‘Like A Prayer’, both of which have been played before but sounded all the more polished for it. The former especially hit all the buttons that Michael could only strive for. In a setlist drawing heavily from her first three records and this year’s The Beekeeper, several of her albums, including the sublime Scarlet’s Walk, were sadly neglected. However, a surprise rendition of Lloyd Cole & The Commotions’ ‘Rattlesnakes’ from her contract-fulfilling covers album Strange Little Girls, seemed unusually at home in the two-hour set.
To attend a Tori Amos gig is to be guaranteed a display of reverence from her notoriously enthusiastic fans and tonight was no different. Some even wept during more tender moments such as the captivating ‘Winter’, live favourite ‘Cooling’ and the hymnal theatrics of ‘The Beekeeper’, a song written last year after Amos’s mother fell ill with a life-threatening heart problem from which she thankfully recovered, and later embellished following the death of her brother Michael in a road accident last November.
In complete contrast, Amos invited onto the stage a choir of six gospel singers to add a welcome sense of fun to the proceedings, unique to this performance. The live debut of the six-minute soulful epic ‘Witness’ was the highlight of the night, though the bizarrely fluid boogie-woogie of empowerment anthem ‘Hoochie Woman’ was another real treat. Only ‘Jamaica Inn’ floundered as Amos switched between her beloved Bösendorfer and Hammond organ a few too many times, slowing the song considerably. Still, Amos’s prodigious talent and mastery of her instrument never fails to amaze and confirms her singular status.
The only true gripe was that, while Amos is undoubtedly a musical auteur, she fared less well visually with some of the worst lighting projections in memory. Certainly she’s no Björk in that department and they added little to the experience. But with a performer so compelling and music this affecting, who really needs such trifling distractions?
Alan Pedder
originally published June 16th, 2005
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Tori Amos
Fade To Red: The Videos ••••½
Rhino
My first encounter with Tori Amos on video was a shot of her hurtling towards a giant spider’s web in the abstract European promo for ‘Cornflake Girl’ (featured here as a bonus extra). Ironically, the striking red hair that hallmarks almost all of her other videos and inspires the name of this collection was indistinguishable to me as I marvelled at this monochrome masterpiece. Okay, well, in hindsight maybe it isn’t really a masterpiece, but then how many music videos are? It’s an inherently silly medium. Which is why it’s so refreshing to come across an artist willing to take a few risks and sometimes even embrace the silliness of it. In fact, most of the videos included here are, in their varying ways, even more remarkable than the cut I first fell in love with, but the point is the same: whichever avenue you take into the wonderful world of Amos’s visual output, it is likely to be a memorable one.
Her first video, ‘Silent All These Years’, is another bold affair and one that has provided most people with their first and most lasting impression of Amos – also becoming the source of the cover shot for her debut album. It comprises mostly of Tori, a white background, a wooden box, some bright red lipstick and those famous red tresses. Simple yet compelling, it works because it allows Amos to breathe. An artist with lesser presence wouldn’t be comfortable laying themselves open to such close scrutiny, yet Amos does it consistently. No matter what guise she takes, Amos never seems overwhelmed. You find yourself believing in her, whether trapped on display in a gallery window, being dragged from a burning building or bound and running away from an unidentified captor as we see in ‘Spark’, possibly the most gripping video I’ve ever laid eyes on. The results are exhilarating.
What hits you is the sheer variety of ideas that Amos and her collaborators seem to have. The sequencing of the videos contributes to this diversity, juxtaposing selections from different points in her fifteen-year career. It would have been silly to lump together the low-budget Little Earthquakes videos at the start of the collection. Whilst each video is its own entity and should be considered as such, the early videos are essentially different sides to the same box that Amos first rolled onto our screens in, none of them quite building on the stark imagery of her first promo. Instead they are much more entertaining and unique when dotted around the collection, reminding us that her vision has been uncompromising from the start. ‘Winter’ even benefits from being sandwiched between the more subversive and stylised ‘A Sorta Fairytale’ (featuring Oscar-winning actor Adrien Brody in perhaps the weirdest allegorical love story ever) and ‘Spark’. Elsewhere, the student-like experimentation of ‘China’ segues perfectly into the more adventurous ‘Raspberry Swirl’ and ‘Talula’ promos. In fact, the early videos are some of the most enjoyable to watch as Amos and director Cindy Palmano play around with the constrictions of the medium.
The music, as always, is simply outstanding. In fact, had 2003’s ‘reconditioned’ retrospective ‘Tales Of A Librarian’ been conceived and presented similarly to this it may have proved a greater testament to her talents. This has obviously been a labour of love for Amos and, overall, it’s a very well packaged and comprehensive collection. A couple of videos are conspicuous by their absence, however. One can only presume that contractual issues prevented the inclusion of the promo for her Stranglers cover, ‘Strange Little Girl’, as it is one of her best. The missing ‘Glory Of The 80s’ video is more of a mystery, although the likely reason for its omission is that it just didn’t make the grade – it’s a video with a nice idea that wasn’t quite realised. Still, do a Google search for either of these and you’ll find them in seconds. As for extras, the personal commentary on each video is a very nice and often hilarious touch, allowing us an insight into the making of and ideas behind the clips.
Matthew Hall
originally published April 10th, 2006
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Tori Amos
The Original Bootlegs ••••½
Epic
Should anyone have any doubts about what a commanding and provocative artist Tori Amos remains, they will surely be put to rest by these officially sanctioned ‘bootlegs’. Recorded during this year’s solo Original Sinsuality and Summer Of Sin tours, five of these double CDs were initially released exclusively online, and have now been packaged together as a comprehensive boxset (along with an extra bonus 2CD recording), offering yet another fix for Amos’s followers. Indeed, 2005 has been an amazingly fertile year for Amos artistically. With another brilliant studio album in The Beekeeper, an absorbing and stylistically innovative memoir in ‘Piece By Piece’, and now these releases, she’s in danger of spoiling us rotten. On these discs, culled from dates in LA, Chicago, Denver, Manchester, London and Boston, we find her singing (better than ever) songs both old and new, rarities and a series of creative covers – sufficient material to keep both diehard enthusiasts and recent converts occupied for months. If you were at these shows (and surely not even Amos’s most devoted fans could have attended all of them) then these CDs offer a wonderful memento of some amazing musical moments. If you weren’t, it’s a chance to catch up on some of what you missed and to savour the enthralling experience that is Amos’s live show.
As skilful as she has been at integrating other instruments into her music over the years, there remains something ineffably magical about Amos performing solo; the only time she shares the spotlight here is when she’s joined in quite spectacular fashion by the a six-piece gospel choir in London. With just piano, Rhodes and Hammond B3 organ to accompany her sinuous vocals, she’s at her most riveting, her ability to command an audience second to none. But is it any wonder that she’s so accomplished? Lest we forget, this self-confessed “road dog” has been performing for audiences since she was a teenager, and there’s a nice nod to those apprentice years in the ‘Piano Bar’ segments featured here, in which she performs her pick of the songs requested by fans via her website.
Among those receiving the Amos treatment are tracks by Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Madonna, Oasis, Bonnie Tyler, George Michael, Bon Jovi and Aerosmith (yes, really!), so it’s just as well that she has such a strong personality as a performer, and such finely-honed interpretive skills, that she stamps her distinctive mark on every one. “This could really be crap,” she warns before delivering a decidedly non-crap version of A Flock Of Seagulls’ ‘I Ran’. Particularly gorgeous are her takes on Jim Croce’s ‘Operator’, where she captures beautifully the combined bravado and vulnerability of the narrator, and ‘Like A Prayer’, which she invests with more genuine sexual and spiritual fervour than Madonna could ever hope to muster. There’s also some typically cherishable between-song banter in these Piano Bar interludes, including one already notorious diatribe. Who but Amos would have the chutzpah to lob some very descriptive insults at Morrissey in front of an audience of Mancunians? It’s one of many reasons to love her.
Another reason is that she’s amassed a back catalogue that ranks among the greatest in contemporary music, and which provides a very rich resource for her to mine in live performances. Aside from her undebatable instrumental prowess, Amos has always been a terrific writer of songs that can be equal parts tender and savage, raw and healing, sad and sensual, and both her oldest and newest material gets a workout here. Highlights from her own repertoire include ‘Little Amsterdam’, sounding spookier than ever with its organ accompaniment; the baroquely beautiful ‘Yes, Anastasia’; the startling ‘Father Lucifer’; the buoyant ‘Take To The Sky’; the ever-green ‘Winter’, ‘Silent All These Years’ and ‘Tear In Your Hand’; and the majestic ‘Cool On Your Island’. It’s fascinating, too, to hear new songs such as ‘Sweet The Sting’ and ‘The Power Of Orange Knickers’ stripped down to just keyboard and voice, and in the process sounding more themselves than ever.
It should be noted that there is, inevitably, quite a bit of repetition of material over the discs. ‘Original Sinsuality’ kicks off every show, and we get several ‘Jamaica Inn’s, ‘Space Dog’s and ‘Parasol’s when we might wish for a ‘Pretty Good Year’ or a ‘Northern Lad’. But, as Amos would no doubt argue, ‘Parasol’ in Chicago on April 15th is not ‘Parasol’ in Denver on April 19th, and the duplication of material does offer a valuable opportunity to compare different versions. Amos is such a spontaneous, in-the-moment performer that she never delivers identikit readings of her songs anyway, and the chance for listeners to play “compare and contrast” is one of the many pleasures offered here. Collectively then, these discs further demonstrate Amos’s sheer mastery of her art. From first note to last, you’re confronted with the slightly overwhelming sensation of hearing a performer at the very peak of her powers. While some critics continue to recycle tired complaints about ‘abstruse lyrics’ and ‘excessive ambition’, Amos just gets on with making some of the most adventurous, intelligent and extraordinary music out there. Long may she continue.
Alex Ramon
originally published December 19th, 2005
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Tori Amos
A Piano: The Collection •••••
Rhino
The release of this monumental compilation just three years after Tales Of A Librarian suggests that the latter ‘best of’ did not entirely satisfy Amos’s desire for a comprehensive retrospective of her career. It’s hardly surprising; having produced a series of stunning, epic records which have each rehabilitated and transformed the notion of the concept album, Amos must surely feel a certain amount of frustration that her extraordinary music is still frequently dismissed by much of the mainstream British music press as the work of a Kate Bush clone. By now, of course, such accusations just sound plain silly: could an artist really sustain nine albums and a succession of Odysseyan tours (not to mention survive a major record company scrap) by simply ‘copying’ another one? Hardly.
Nonetheless, the persistence of these kinds of comments points to a worrying critical tendency to dismiss certain female artists on entirely superficial grounds of similarity. While identikit male guitar bands and warbling R&B wannabes merrily rip each other off without comment or censure, some critics’ indignant response to Amos’s work – “We’ve already got one like that!” – sadly reflects a refusal to engage with another complex, uncompromising (and resolutely female) artistic vision. Such a reaction seems both glaringly unfair as well as inaccurate. After all, surface similarities notwithstanding, Bush and Amos have never been all that alike in performance style, lyrical content or career philosophy; it’s about as easy to envisage Bush embarking on a 200-date tour as it is to imagine Amos writing a rhapsodic ode to light and birdsong and getting Rolf Harris to sing on it. Fortunately, Amos’s heartening response to such blinkered critical diminishment has been to keep her focus firmly placed upon her music, as vividly demonstrated by A Piano, a beautifully packaged collection that fully confirms her singular status. This boxset – which, in a stroke of design genius, is shaped to resemble the keyboard of one of Amos’s treasured Bösendorfers – contains five discs and 86 tracks but still only manages to scratch the surface of her brilliant career.
That said, even the most ardent of Toriphiles may approach this release with a mixture of delight and trepidation. Since Amos’s records are so intricately worked out, so thematically cohesive, do we really want another collection that inevitably distorts their immaculate sequencing and, by so doing, risks muddying our memories of the original albums? The fact is that a collection such as this one can never hope to please all of the people all of the time, and once you’ve recovered from the shock of some truly questionable omissions (no ‘Northern Lad’! no ‘Talula’! no ‘Scarlet’s Walk’, fer chrissake!) and the not overly generous supply of new and rare material (just seven previously unreleased tracks in all, along with some alternate mixes, demos and a healthy assortment of B-sides), it’s time to relax and savour what is here, as well as the fact that Amos has been able to produce the collection and oversee the selection process herself. In her own words: “A lot of times you’re a grand- mother when you get that opportunity to do the boxset – or you’re dead. To be current and creating, alongside putting a retrospective together, is an opportunity that you don’t always have in life.” For Amos, this collection marks “the end of an era” and it testifies to both the stylistic diversity of her output and the consistency of its quality. If her music is intricately bound up in your existence and identity then the experience of listening to A Piano is rather like flicking through a book of your own life, and discovering that, while a few crucial chapters have gone missing, they’ve been replaced by others that you’d forgotten about and a few that you didn’t know were there.
It will come as no surprise that no inclusions from Amos’s ill-starred Y Kant Tori Read days are made; instead, the first four discs trace a broadly chronological path through her post-1990 career, taking in everything from the bare-bones intimacy of Little Earthquakes, the dynamic rock of From The Choirgirl Hotel, the swirling electronica of To Venus & Back and the widescreen panoramas of the mighty Scarlet’s Walk. Disc A is something of a settling of scores, presenting an extended and rearranged version of Little Earthquakes that more accurately reflects Amos’s original vision of the album. It’s a bold (and possibly foolhardy) move to re-order a record that, for most of us, was perfect in its original incarnation, and no doubt many admirers of the album will feel a certain amount of ambivalence about Amos’s decision to do this. Happily, the re-sequencing does not interfere with the impact of the album, which still sounds incredibly powerful, retaining its ability to chill, inspire, shock and console in equal measure. And it’s unquestionably a bonus to have B-sides the likes of ‘Upside Down’, ‘Flying Dutchman’, ‘Take To The Sky’ and ‘Sweet Dreams’ collected together in one place on this disc.
Discs B-D mix tracks from Under The Pink, Boys For Pele, Choirgirl, Venus, Scarlet’s Walk and The Beekeeper with pit stops for the rare and unreleased material, while Disc E collates a selection of her B-sides and demos. (A typically well-produced booklet offers photos, background detail and commentaries on many of the inclusions.) As on Tales Of A Librarian, some of the album tracks have been subtly (and in some cases, very subtly) remixed from the original versions; in Amos’s terms, these are acts of “refurbishment” designed to prevent her earlier work from sounding dated. The most noticeable tweaking occurs on the dense choirgirl tracks: violent guitar stabs and all manner of unidentifiable sinister noises add new layers of atmosphere to ‘Cruel’ and ‘iieee’, while the Kurzweil and sighing pedal steel on ‘Playboy Mommy’ are given extra space. All the remixes are effective, however, contributing a crisper and cleaner sound to the songs.
If last year’s Official Bootleg series demonstrated Amos’s ability to command an audience with ‘just’ her voice and exquisite keyboard skills, these discs remind of her equally dextrous control of studio toys and band dynamics, not to mention the evolution of her singing and the complex beauty of her songwriting. As her frames of reference have broadened, taking her music ever deeper into history (or herstory), politics, myth and legend, Amos has learned how to utilise a select group of musicians – principally, drummer Matt Chamberlain and bassist Jon Evans – who share her sense of studio meticulousness. The opportunity that this boxset offers to trace her creative arc is genuinely thrilling, and it may surprise some listeners that the noisiest, rockiest songs here are among the most piercingly effective. But the constant component of her work is, of course, the piano, and these discs attest to her consistent and creative reinvention of that instrument as a vital and versatile part of the pop-rock idiom.
There’s always something new to uncover in Amos’s songs and each listener will of course have their own favourite (re-)discoveries as they dive into this collection. But it’s the new material that most fans will make a beeline for first, and the previously unreleased tracks are as brilliant as anything she’s ever done. The tense ‘Take Me With You’ (which Amos began in 1990 and finally completed this year) is an immediate highlight, a seamless merging of her earliest and most recent sensibilities. ‘Walk To Dublin (Sucker Reprise)’ is a captivating slice of harpsichord-driven Pele-era madness, while the Beekeeper reject ‘Not David Bowie’ rocks and rumbles with a blistering mix of Hammond organ and clavinet that has to be heard to be believed. Meanwhile, ‘Marys Of The Sea’ gets supplemented by a cheeky ‘intro jam’ which finds Amos scatting and improvising over funky piano, bass and drums. “I’ve got to face some kind of evil tomorrow,” she sings, rather cheerfully. Elsewhere, ‘Ode To My Clothes’ manages to be both playful and desolate and ‘Dolphin Song’ is simply mesmerising.
Each of these tracks demonstrates her amazing ability to take a song through diverse emotions, metres and moods. With her richly expressive vocals, Amos can turn a tender ballad of love betrayed savage with a simple shift in intonation or a casually dropped profanity – listen to the eruption of anger that spills into the bridge of ‘Take Me With You’ or the sudden Southern twist she puts on the “daughter of a preacher man” lyric in ‘Dolphin Song’. Her vocalisations are peerless in their expressiveness and unpredictability. Meanwhile, intricate temporal shifts in the music are matched and enhanced by startling lyrical juxtapositions: ‘Sister Janet’ finds her “slipping the blade in the marmalade”; ‘Beulah Land’ has her requesting “religion, and a lobotomy”; on ‘Honey’ she’s trying to “bribe the undertaker” and confronting a man who only “liked [his] babies tight.” (Listening to these lyrics you may find yourself wondering whether it can be a mere coincidence that Amos was born in the year Sylvia Plath died.)
From moment to moment, you never know in what direction her songs are going to take you: the nine-minute ‘Zero Point’ spends a few seconds masquerading as a delicate piano ballad before mutating into an epic of programmed beats and distorted guitar. Elsewhere, vaudeville touches merge with classical flourishes, furious harpsichord joins with church bells. As she put it so memorably in her semi-autobiography ‘Piece By Piece’: “Some days life can feel pretty normal…then there are other days that make you think you’ve walked into something sinister, like a Hermann Hesse novel.” Her songs contain and convey that breadth of feeling and experience, allowing the sacred and profane, the oblique and the brutally direct, the mythic and the colloquial, to occupy the same breathing space. Few musicians have the capacity to channel such calm and frenzy, either live or on record. And even fewer can match her ability to combine intellectual rigorousness with visceral emotion. But, for all her intensity, A Piano exposes an incredible amount of humour in her work, black and otherwise.
Still, it’s a genuine shame that none of her brilliant covers are featured, no ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ or ‘Angie’, and nothing from her bracingly subversive (and criminally underrated) Strange Little Girls album – who wouldn’t kill to hear her rendition of Public Enemy’s ‘Fear Of A Black Planet’? Anything, in fact, would be preferable to the Armand van Helden dance remix of ‘Professional Widow’, which, as on Tales…, sounds like a garish intrusion here. However, its appearance is compensated for by the inclusion of a blood-curdlingly intense live version of the song elsewhere. Moreover, the B-side disc yields a spectacular sequence of songs, including an inspired deconstruction of ‘Home On The Range’ (which clearly anticipates Scarlet’s Walk‘s investigation of Native American history), the most poignant version of ‘This Old Man’ you’re ever likely to hear and the rare ‘Merman’, one of her most haunting compositions. The demo medley is also a wonderful addition that bravely showcases works in progress; it’s fascinating to hear the complex narrative of ‘A Sorta Fairytale’ being developed, while on ‘Playboy Mommy’ she truly sounds as if she’s in the process of channelling the song from another dimension.
As with all of Amos’s work, thought, care and an almost visionary quality of attention to detail have gone into the compilation of A Piano. This remarkable collection confirms her genius, contextualising an extensive body of work that, spiritually speaking, owes as much to The Beatles, Led Zeppelin or Nirvana as Kate Bush and yet retains its utter uniqueness. Along with last year’s Official Bootleg series, the autobiography and this year’s ‘Fade To Red’ video collection, A Piano offers another opportunity to explore the depths in Amos’s music as we await the next step on her journey (a new studio album is due next spring). It’s a pricey purchase, to be sure, but think of it as a spiritual investment…you’ll be listening to these songs forever.
Alex Ramon
originally published October 27th, 2006
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Tori Amos
American Doll Posse ••••½
Epic
Notwithstanding a certain newspaper’s recent assertion that she’s “as fashionable as carbohydrates” these days – the kind of glib pronouncement that only an esteemed Brit broadsheet can make – the release of a new Tori Amos album remains an event for many of us. Despite the underestimation of her 21st century output by the mainstream music press, Amos, to her credit, has not wavered in her commitment to producing bold, thematically ambitious records in the face of patronisation and dismissal. From the covers-album-as-conceptual-extravaganza Strange Little Girls through the state-of-the-nation travelogue masterpiece Scarlet’s Walk to the lush “sonic gardens” of The Beekeeper, her recent work cries out for reappraisal. While none of these releases may have satisfied anyone still hoping for Little Earthquakes II, each testified to her willingness to experiment and bend the album form in all manner of strange and original directions.
Last year’s colossal A Piano boxset was similarly underrated (not to mention under-reviewed): the collection functioned as a timely reminder of the singularity of Amos’s vision, but was sadly overlooked by all but the die-hards. Alas, it seems that her new album, American Doll Posse, has failed to fully revive her commercial fortunes either, at least on this side of the Atlantic, debuting at a lowly number 50 on the UK album chart in the week that saw new albums by Ne-Yo and Natasha Bedingfield go Top 10. It’s probably best not to linger over the cultural implications of this though, as it has subsequently emerged that the low chart placing was due to a particularly bizarre bit of regulation which barred sales of the album’s special edition from inclusion in the count. (Beck’s The Information suffered the same fate last year.)
But if mainstream success seems likely to continue to elude her now, Amos can rest assured that she has created another work of breathtaking stylistic reach, uninhibited passion and fierce intellect. A something-for-everyone record in the mould of avowed inspirations such as The White Album and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, American Doll Posse unabashedly returns post-millennial pop to the 1970s era of grand art-rock gestures, mixing it up with a healthy dose of brazen gynocentricism, and fuelled by Amos’s wholesale assimilation (Bach to the Beatles and Bowie by way of Bartók) of the history of music.
Perhaps in witty response to those who complained that The Beekeeper was far too long, Amos here produces an album that is shorter than its predecessor – by less than a minute. Boasting a mammoth 23 tracks, American Doll Posse tops both Scarlet’s Walk and The Beekeeper for sheer unadulterated epic-ness, while maintaining a rougher, brasher (some might say less subtle) tone. As all interested parties are aware by now, the album’s concept sees Amos continuing her investigation of the possibilities of role-play and character in order to conjure five distinct female personas inspired by the Greek pantheon: Isabel (Artemis), Clyde (Persephone), Santa (Aphrodite), Pip (Athena), and – in a pleasing po-mo touch – Tori (Demeter and Dionysus, no less). These characters are our narrators and guides through the Posse maze – liner notes helpfully identify who’s singing what – sometimes duetting or providing background vocals for each other, and offering their diverse takes on contemporary experience, from the overtly political to the deeply personal.
With dedicated internet blogs, their own wardrobes, and a heap of characteristically high-flown rhetoric about challenging the supremacy of the American Christer-Republican matrix through the unification of the compartmentalised feminine (phew), it’s pretty clear (if it wasn’t already) that Amos holds no fear of the accusations of posturing and pretension that she must be aware will inevitably follow. However, anyone who’s read Amos’s autobiography ‘Piece By Piece’ will know just how central the study of myth and archetype has become to her creative process and, in this sense, American Doll Posse feels like the natural outcome of her recent influences and concerns. There’s a practical side to the concept too: the problem with something-for-everyone albums – especially ones that last 79 minutes – is that they can lack cohesion. Amos’s recourse to personas allows her to sidestep this pitfall, and provides her with a fresh way to effectively channel and utilise all of the multifarious elements that make up her musical personality.
But leaving aside conceptual befuddlements for the moment (we’ll return to them later, sorry), how does American Doll Posse actually sound? Very good indeed. Fortunately, Amos’s socio-political agenda has not led her to produce the sonic equivalent of a Hélène Cixous essay. Rather, with typical unpredictability, she’s given us a record that is, for the most part, thoroughly accessible: sexy, decadent, slightly disreputable fun. For all the pomposity of her rhetoric, Amos seems fully aware that there’s a great deal of frivolous, high-camp potential to the concept she’s devised, and she appears to be having a very good time exploring it.
Moreover, even with Amos plainly leading the charge as she operates her inimitable keyboard arsenal (Rhodes, Wurlitzer, electric piano, clavichord and mellotron accompany the Bösendorfer this time), Posse is also very much a collaborative work. Across the album Matt Chamberlain’s protean drumming and Jon Evans’s lithe bass join with her to achieve the kind of sustained symbiosis which is only possible after many months of shared live performance. A couple of tracks boast a string quartet arranged with typically exquisite precision by long-time collaborator John Philip Shenale, but the album’s real surprise lies in the contributions of the enigmatic ‘Mac Aladdin’ (recently revealed to be Mark Hawley, aka Mr. Amos), who emerges from the shadows to contribute incendiary electric guitar work throughout. The result is an album that rocks hard; Amos hasn’t got this consistently noisy on record since 1999’s To Venus & Back. That she manages to do so while continuing to engage in an intelligent and literate manner with thorny questions of gender, identity, power and politics suggests something of her achievement here.
But if Posse quickly gets raucous it actually starts out quiet, with trademark portentous piano chords ushering in Isabel’s brief opening Bush-salute, ‘Yo George’, a hushed piano-voice duet that serves as a chilling and inviting induction into the record. This is not the first time that Amos has set the leader of the free world in her sights (cf. ‘Sweet Dreams’, ‘Indian Summer’ and her blistering deconstruction of ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’ which sampled the voices of Bush Jr and Snr), and here she proves conclusively that political statement doesn’t have to be loud to be effective, a sublimely appropriate reference to a certain Alan Bennett play redeeming the piece from obviousness. Throughout, the album’s major tracks are interspersed with such short (but stylistically varied) songs, Boys For Pele-esque interludes that arrive like brief bulletins from the underworld. Listeners will decide for themselves whether these constitute a valuable addition to the album or a waste of space, but the grungy ‘Fat Slut’ (a reference to Catherine Breillat’s notorious 2001 film ‘Fat Girl’?), the implicatory ‘Devils & Gods’, the deliciously disturbing Weimar cabaret ‘Velvet Revolution’, and Santa’s sly ode to adaptability, ‘Programmable Soda’, offer so many lyrical and melodic gems that it’s very hard to begrudge their appearance. And given the album’s surfeit of material maybe it’s not a bad thing to be left wanting more of something.
Such is Amos’s healthy relationship to her Muse(s) that, barring the occasional strained moment, there’s amazingly little filler on Posse. As far as the major tracks go, things begin to get really interesting as soon as ‘Big Wheel’, an unexpected piece of swaggering honky-tonk that nicely establishes the album’s gender agenda, its brilliant bridge turning on the already-infamous appropriation of an impolite appreciatory acronym. It’s followed by the thumping drums and galloping pianos of Clyde’s delectable ‘Bouncing Off Clouds’, a song that continues the sharp-eyed investigation into “the way we communicate”, which has always been a central theme of Amos’s writing. “Failure to respond worked / I talked, but did you listen?” she enquires, the challenges of human interaction – whether between lovers, enemies or the individual and a perceived Authority – remaining a primary concern throughout the album.
With screaming electric guitar and a vocal that roves from Peckham High Street to the San Fernando Valley in the space of a syllable, Pip takes over on the magnificently truculent ‘Teenage Hustling’, a song which uncovers a link between soliciting and salvation that few would dare to make. ‘Digital Ghost’ is a superb piano-ballad-goes-glam hybrid that uses technology obsession as a metaphor for emotional unavailability. Lurching into an unanticipated 1960s girl-group chorus, ‘Mr. Bad Man’ is a surprisingly playful take on those archetypal oppressive patriarchs, while ‘You Can Bring Your Dog’ struts like a gender-inverted Led Zeppelin classic, with Amos (via Santa) unleashing her best Robert-Plant-in-heat as she proclaims “I’m not living to be the Mrs.,” an assertion that could be the album’s mission statement.
There’s a similarly retro feel to much of the material, and Amos intelligently mines and melds her diverse influences without ever resorting to larceny. Gently revising one of her favourite songs, ‘Eleanor Rigby’, the deeply affecting ‘Girl Disappearing’ questions the inevitability of a woman’s apparent annihilation, while the Fleetwood Mac-meets-REM ‘Secret Spell’ is one of those exhilarating anthems of self-reliance that have always been her speciality. As she bites down hard on the “sold a dream at 23” lyric we realise that the song is documenting a series of turning points in a young girl’s life (almost certainly her own; her miserably received first band Y Kant Tori Read was signed to a six-album deal with Atlantic Records when she was 23) and the resolve she’s going to require just to survive them intact.
Arriving at the crucial mid-album mark, ‘Body & Soul’ – all clumping percussion, staccato piano and dirty bass – is an electrifying ‘duet’ between Santa and Pip, and one that brilliantly blurs the border between sexy and scary. The pensive, political ‘Father’s Son’ condenses the spectres of a dozen recent ecological disasters into the immortal inquiry “can we blame nature if she’s had enough of us?”, and the elegantly turbulent ‘Code Red’ bathes in an ambience that wouldn’t have seemed out of place on 1998’s From The Choirgirl Hotel. “Do this long enough you get a taste for it,” Amos sings, and the surrounding lyrics are ambiguous enough to suggest that she may have playing music, masturbation or living itself on her mind.
In a Clyde double bill, ‘Beauty Of Speed’ juxtaposes an evening’s rapture with the more complicated realities visible in “the harsh of daylight,” while ‘Roosterspur Bridge’ takes its place as this album’s ‘Northern Lad’. The luminous, offbeat ‘Almost Rosey’ channels ‘American Pie’ and boasts some of Amos’s cleverest, most intricate wordplay. A conversation between Isabel and some shadowy gentleman (a soldier? her father? a lover?), ‘Dark Side Of The Sun’ envisages the consequences of American cultural imperialism – “soon there’ll be fast food on the moon / painted in neon with ‘for sale’ signs up” – before turning the spotlight firmly on the personal and the present: “you say I’m more afraid of what / tomorrow could bring to us.” But Amos is too sharp and imaginative to leave us to wallow in despair, and what you’re likely to take away from the song is the image of endurance, the obligation to persist even in the face of hardship and oppression: “Brush back my tears and he said ‘girl / we have to soldier on / yes girl, even when we don’t feel strong.'” As usual, Biblical allusions course through many of these tracks. “Bushes” are burning on the mountain in this one; think back to ‘Yo George’ and make of that particular image what you will.
The album proper arguably ends here, but Amos has a trick or two up her sleeve yet. If ‘Posse Bonus’ is the album equivalent of one of those cheeky improv jams that are staples of her live show, then Pip’s ‘Smokey Joe’ and Santa’s ‘Dragon’ are American Doll Posse‘s magnificent encores, the former a deeply disturbing contrapuntal debate about the benefits (or otherwise) of brutal female retribution, the latter a compassionate rebuttal which bravely posits love, not violence, as the answer: “now it has come to light / the Gods they have slipped up / they forgot about the power / of a woman’s love.” It’s an extension of the dispute between these two in ‘Body & Soul’ – in which Santa advised Pip that “these devils of yours, they need love” – and one that attests to the breadth and complexity of Amos’s vision. There’s no sentimentality, no cosiness in her version of female understanding, and ‘Dragon’ – on which it’s the woman who must slay the beast – plays out with ‘Smokey Joe’s assertion that “the annihilating Feminine does not need civilizing” still echoing in your mind.
Lyrically, as some of the previous quotes demonstrate, Amos continues to cut with a very sharp scalpel indeed. If there’s a retro feel to much of the music, her subject matter remains resolutely current and contemporary. Avoiding the fey romanticism and preciousness which mars the work of some of her descendents, and veering ever closer to the complex poetry, her songwriting on Posse retains its thrilling mixture of brutal frankness and hermetic opacity, each track containing some indelible image, some surprising turn of phrase. “Genital panic,” “feeling radical in cotton,” “silken rubber gloves choking his vitriolic tongue,” “a gold star on a gendarme,” “blondes here don’t jump out of cakes,” “working her hell on that red carpet,” “boycotting trends / it’s my new look this season” – Amos is highly allusive but also colloquial, solidly structured yet apparently spontaneous, rarely sloppy or repetitious. Combined with the expressiveness of her vocals, the by now notorious ambiguities of her diction, and her immaculate musicianship, Amos’s impact is often overwhelming.
But the profundity of American Doll Posse ultimately lies in the aspects that may prove most problematic for some listeners: its concept and its scale. “The songs that have been coming to me lately, with their varied points of view, have been helping me to see how many different aspects of the self there are and that there is so much to work with, for each of us, at every stage,” Amos wrote in her conclusion to ‘Piece By Piece’, and this album feels like her practical demonstration of that statement. For what Posse offers the dedicated listener is a truly multi-vocal experience, a composite picture of contemporary American womanhood that is so rich that it ends up surpassing both national and gender specifics. What’s more, the entire album may be interpreted as a celebration of the benefits to be gleaned from looking at the world from multiple and often contradictory viewpoints – a particularly valuable endeavour in this polarised period. “Objectivity,” Isabel’s liner notes tell us, “can only be attained if you are open to another perception, even one that is contrary to your own.”
Accordingly, Amos’s women are not static creations; during the album they change through interaction with each other, their identities blurring and merging and complicating the labels that have been ascribed to them. In some ways, Amos could’ve taken the concept further – how about inviting one of those much-maligned “right-wing Christians” into the Posse? – but, even so, there’s liberation and subversion in the way in which the album tramples across gender stereotypes, locating the strength in Clyde’s vulnerability, the wisdom and potency in Santa’s sexuality, the doubt in Isabel’s political conviction. By the end, on ‘Smokey Joe’, there’s even the suggestion that Pip’s aggression may be turning to equivocation. Against the societal divisions that “pit woman against feminist,” male against female, the political against the personal, Amos constructs a kaleidoscope of paradox and contradiction, of competing and complimentary voices. In the process, what she offers us is nothing less than a guide to the possibility of surmounting repressive binary logic and of working creatively with the “many different aspects of the self” there are.
Between the concept, the blogs, Blaise Reutersward’s spectacular photography and – oh yes – the music itself, American Doll Posse provides sufficient material to sustain a thesis, not a review. Long but never sluggish, dense but never dry, this is the album as artefact – a wide open space for the listener to explore in. Whether it possesses the complete cohesion and control of Scarlet’s Walk is debatable, but, in this era of the short attention span, Amos has once again crafted a work that deliberately thwarts easy consumption, requiring instead a listener’s total sensory engagement, participation, and occasional forbearance. It’s a rare enough event in our culture, and one to be savoured, not scorned. (How often can a major-label musician be accused of indulging themselves with an excess of ideas these days?) To download bits and pieces of this album, to hear a few tracks and rush to snap judgement, seems a betrayal of the dedication and commitment that has gone into its composition. Immersion is the only solution here, and if you don’t have the time or inclination for that – well, new Ne-Yo and Natasha Bedingfield albums await you. But if you’re up for an experience, dive in, and marvel at Amos’s ability to produce yet another vital record that at once reflects and transcends our troubled times.
Alex Ramon
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Vitamin String Quartet
Pieces: The String Quartet Tribute to Tori Amos Vol. 2 •••
Vitamin
Having tackled the music of an astonishingly diverse selection of artists (everyone from Björk through The Cure to Garth Brooks), and with over 200 releases to its credit, Vitamin Records’ String Quartet Tribute series now brings us a second volume dedicated to the work of Tori Amos, a follow-up to 2001’s generally well-received Precious Things. It’s probably fair to say that most of us have mixed feelings about this series: putting a classical spin on rock music seems a brave but somewhat foolhardy idea, and one which risks turning intense, hard-edged songs into pleasant muzak. However, while this record doesn’t entirely assuage such reservations, it’s a classy effort which serves as a testament both to Amos’s impeccable sense of melody and to the variety and adaptability of her compositions.
While Precious Things concentrated on material from Amos’s first few albums, Pieces takes an impressively broad sweep through her voluminous back catalogue, including songs from each of her studio albums bar Under The Pink and the covers project Strange Little Girls. (In a nice bit of serendipity, Amos herself has employed a string quartet for the first time on her new album American Doll Posse.) Fans will be pleased to discover that many of the song choices are far from obvious, and that some of them are, in fact, wonderfully left-field: it’s a delight to find underrated gems such as ‘Cars & Guitars’, ‘Taxi Ride’ and Tales Of A Librarian‘s ‘Snow Cherries From France’ here, each beautifully performed.
The album has a very good sense of pace and flow and opens, appropriately, with ‘Jackie’s Strength’, that extraordinary amalgam of intimate autobiography and US social history. This version can’t really hope to compete with John Philip Shenale’s sublime string arrangement on the original but it remains an affecting rendition. A playful ‘Sweet The Sting’ and a gracefully mournful ‘China’ are among the other highlights, while ‘Spark’ and ‘Professional Widow’ (yes, really!) manage to retain an amazing amount of the turbulent menace of the originals. ‘Me & A Gun’ – which Amos famously delivered a cappella – is another surprising choice, and one that doesn’t quite come off, but lovely takes on ‘1000 Oceans’ and ‘A Sorta Fairytale’ quickly compensate.
It will come as no surprise that Pieces ultimately fails to fully convey the passion, density and complexity of Amos’s music: how can it without two of the most significant components, that voice and those words? But it’s a worthy collection which offers a fresh perspective on a formidable body of work.
Alex Ramon
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