The new Tori Amos album is fabulous

The new LP has such spots and so I'm pleased with it. Whether she's a spent force or not is a mute point to me as long as she has that voice that first made me woozy for her records...

i think it's her best album! (i haven't heard scarlet's walk or the new one tho.)

Little Earthquakes
From The Choirgirl Hotel
To Venus and Back
Boys For Pele
Scarlet's Walk
Strange Little Girls
Under The Pink
The Beekeeper

300% readership increase. Welcome to capitalism.

A friend of mine has gone on about this album several times. Honestly I didn't even know it was out until she said it was.

Although, when they make her look as rowr as this:

http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/B0000E2Y9A.02.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

I don't mind.

Shame she can't make good music any more.

I honestly can't put my finger on what it is that's seen such a decrease in her abilities over the past five years. As I (somewhat sensationistically) said in my review, she's a woman that's always seemed to thrive from a certain buzz to her work, when she's grappling with an issue, and now she seems to have a pretty comfortable life, where's the intrigue? It's like second album syndrome, except ten albums into her career.

in another ten years she'll look like jeanne-claude!

http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/christo/portrait1.gif

If you live on Bizarro World! Boys For Pele is her best record by a million miles.

did you not scroll down to the bottom? plenty people do. Dom's line is pretty vicious but I dunno, I thought prefacing it with 'i'm going to hell anyway' makes it clear that the author is aware of what cruel joke he's making and that making it doesn't reflect kindly on himself.

Sheesh. Yes, I noticed the preface. Casual viciousness bothers me. It's easy, and cheap, and stupid. I do think some of the crazy over-the-top boiled-them-in-their-own-filth invective that gets thrown at people who make bad art is quite funny, can't you all just stick to that?

Little Earthquakes
From The Choirgirl Hotel
Under the Pink
To Venus and Back
The Beekeeper
Scarlet's Walk
Boys for Pele
Strange Little Girls

These are halcyon days for the genre, FM radio hasn’t sounded as good since 1985—it’s a good time to be running away from the underground.

Is this true?

I suppose this could be a thread of its own .....

I love(d) that Librarian cover though. I also liked most of her Little Earthquakes-era stuff. (You know, "God," "Silent All These Years," etc.)

And the lyrics to "Glory of the 80's" are fantastic.

I like imagining what it would've been like to see a pre-fame Tori on "American Idol." Probably wouldn't have made it through the door, alas.

Maybe, if the whole having any concept of right and wrong whatsoever just isn't your bag, another reason to take it down would be that it risks permanently tarnishing the reputation of your entire site. And if you say you don't care about that, I suspect more of your readers than you think are going to have a real serious problem when you start messing with somebody's kid.

well, maybe, but the new tori amos promotional display is freakish.

pardon? not to go on a tangent, but i wouldn't call 'House Tornado', for example, precious.

You see, this is the thing though. The only way you could take what I'm saying to mean that someone should kill T*sh Am*s is if you think that the artistic output of an artist is more valuable than their personal happiness. I don't think that. I never said that.

One could argue, "If it gets a reaction, it's done its job", and if the job is to get hate mail for your blog, then that's okay I suppose. Mission accomplished. I'm just not sure what the point of it is. It just feels desperate.

From The Choirgirl Hotel
Boys For Pele
To Venus And Back
Little Earthquakes
Under The Pink
Strange Little Girls
Scarlet's Walk
The Beekeeper

I still consider the first three to be some sort of genius pinnacle of music: I don't obsess over them as much as at the time, but they still floor me every time I put them on, and it's nice to be reassured that no, it wasn't just me being an angsty teenager and yes, they are fucking awesome pieces of work.

The new album is a bit dull. If she'd pruned half the songs and actually gone to the trouble of arranging the rest interestingly (as opposed to soporific bass + muffled drums + tinkling piano on EVERY FUCKING SONG), it would have been rather good - there are some pretty tunes hidden in there. That said, it is a bit sad that an artist of Tori's calibre now only has 'pretty tunes' as her redeeming quality. And it's VERY sad that where she once treated the piano as some kind of bizarre bridge between the rock and the baroque, she now plays it like she's auditioning for Coldplay.

I don't really buy the Tori-thrives-on-tragedy argument though, mostly because the album which shows her at her most innovative and adventurous (Venus) was written post-marriage - and even Strange Little Girls displays a desire to stretch herself artistically, even despite its flaws, and that was as recent as 2001. It's possibly just getting old - she realises that it wouldn't be dignified to be contorting herself in the throes of emotion at the age of 42, but she doesn't quite know what to do instead.

NB: I LOVE TORI'S MUSIC, and I love that her fans are so committed. But the form of their commitment is identification, the way every litle drop of the art has to come back to, be a comment on, justification of, condemnation of, a "real life" that the fans recognize as real and like their own. What a terrible box to put any artist in, even one who sometimes courts such relationships with fans -- it totally fucks up the possibilities of aesthetic pleasures, among other things.

Dom's flippant crack should do something useful, which is sort of make highly visible this trap. And I think that the responses which take Dom's suggestion seriously, as an actual ethical position, do a good job of revealing exactly this problem. Dudes! How can I love any of these songs if they're required to exist in a universe where they're constantly measured for their righteousness rather than their beauty, humor, mood, surprise? And ditto how can I love music crit in that universe?

the middle's fair enough, but if he can't figure out what's wrong with the beginning and ending of that review, he really should stop writing. it's okay to be a rabid fan, but that review... it reminds me that people who send mail bombs are self-righteously convinced that they're trying to 'help'

I understood your 'point', you're obviously a dedicated fanatic who truly cares about the work, the review contains an entire career overview, you know every record, and your point is that this is a new low. To the point where you feel it's okay to suggest that she could make better albums if her kid were murdered, and sign off your review with snarking about cosmetic surgery... that's not professional, or helpful, that's just contemptible. And shows a real confusion about the relationship between a listener and the human behind the music you seem to love.

I've been let down by artists to soul-crushing degrees too, to the point where it occurs to you as a fan that you nearly need to stage some kind of Intervention or something, but seriously, reconsider your profession if you think it's okay to publish things that ugly. Let alone proceed to whine about 'controversy' and 'readership'. What's your goal here?

Yeah this is right, but, then, when I think of Tori taking prettiness to extremes with backing vocals I think of "Father Lucifer" from Boys For Pele rather than anything from Scarlett's Walk. The frustrating thing about Tori's new AOR direction is that, even if you like Tori-AOR, focusing on it explicitly was not necessary because it was always already there. And when people describe Boys For Pele as impenetrable I think, "well, there's the lyrics and the abrupt shifts in style/tempo/mood, but in terms of infectious songcraft that period was surely her peak (you can bet that if any Tori song was gonna become a standard it would be "Hey Jupiter" or "Baker Baker" or "Putting The Damage On"). The frequently circulated idea that all of Tori's talents (even when recognised as such) somehow fall outside the realms of traditional, conservative songsmithery as we understand it has always been totally bogus; it applies to her as little as it applies to Stevie Nicks, regardless of the differences in chart placings.

I'm not even sure if Boys For Pele is my actual favourite (really everything up to To Venus & Back is fantastic in my opinion) but it's my theoretical favourite, the answer I feel most comfortable giving, because it's the moment when the sheer breadth of Tori's talents are most carefully laid out, and her irresistibility in spite of her contradictions is most clear (because she's at her most irresistible and most contrary).

What's the book like? If this was '96 I'd've lapped it up but right now I fear lengthy excursions into hippiedom and rambling explanations of the concept behind The Beekeeper.

But the form of their commitment is identification, the way every litle drop of the art has to come back to, be a comment on, justification of, condemnation of, a "real life" that the fans recognize as real and like their own. What a terrible box to put any artist in, even one who sometimes courts such relationships with fans -- it totally fucks up the possibilities of aesthetic pleasures, among other things.

Agreed that if relentless fan/idol identification becomes a box then it can be unhealthy (for the fans, for obvious reasons; for the artist, who can become complacent, as Tori seems to have), but I actually think that the prevalence of such full-throttle identification among Tori fans is something which is not only really fascinating (as much as the Tori nuts irritate me, it's equally irritating to see them dismissed out of hand, as if how they relate to the music is less valid than how rational, objective minds would) - but also fundamentally based on certain qualities in her music and lyrics.

Yeah this is right, but, then, when I think of Tori taking prettiness to extremes with backing vocals I think of "Father Lucifer" from Boys For Pele rather than anything from Scarlett's Walk.

I dunno, it's a different sort of prettiness - the "Father Lucifer" backing vocals are pretty but also unnerving and confusing: the triple round thing she pulls can totally fuck with your mind. The layers and layers of high-but-not-too-high-register vocals throughout Scarlet's Walk are soothing and gentle, and it's that type of extreme prettiness which characterises it.

Post-2002 Tori-AOR's truly great moments - "A Sorta Fairytale", "Strange", "Taxi Ride", "Virginia", "Gold Dust" (from Scarlet's Walk); "Snow Cherries From France" (from her greatest hits collection); "Seaside" (from the bonus CD which came with last year's live DVD which - shockah - has not been mentioned so far, and probably will never be again); "Sweet The Sting", "Hoochie Woman" (from The Beekeeper).

Tim - I say Choirgirl is my theoretical favourite for exactly the same reasons; in practice it's probably To Venus And Back right now.

Tori Amos in 1994:

http://img30.exs.cx/img30/534/toriamos19947tz.jpg

Tori Amos in 2005:

http://img30.exs.cx/img30/3623/toriamos20051jw.jpg

Taxi Ride and A Sorta Fairytale are better than anything on Beekeeper - agreed - but the rest of Scarlett's Walk really does seem to drag on and on.