Tori Amos - Night of Hunters

Tori's new album is here (and on Spotify). It's really different from her past work. Here:

Night of Hunters was created because of a commission by Deutsche Grammophon, to create a 21st century song cycle that took into account classical works from the last 400 years. She built it around 14 songs from variations on Bach, Debussy, Granados, Alkan, Satie, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Mussorgsky, and Gregorian chant. Its themes reflect the journey of a woman who finds herself in distress as a relationship dies, and must find inner strength to transcend her circumstances.

I was listening to it early this morning and was finding it really gorgeous. Not poppy at all, and she just sounds master of her instrument. Her daughter sings on a few tracks and has a really unique voice. Anyone else listen to it yet?

I just started listening to this and the first song is better than anything she's done in 10 years.

the cover art is horrifying though, jesus

ooh, thanks for the heads up. "different from her past work" is encouraging to hear

holy shit, her daughter's voice! i guess if your mom's tori amos, you learn a thing or two about cadence and enunciation, but still -- not what i was expecting out of a ten-year-old. i had to skip ahead and listen to all the tracks she was on, loving it.

I'm just listening to this now, and I have to agree that this is probably the best thing she's done since the From the Choirgirl Hotel/To Venus and Back era.

wow, that's encouraging

I've actually grown fond of American Doll Posse, but I agree it's her best since Choirgirl.

i count TVAB as part of her god period - SLG and SW had enough great stuff on them to probably be classed in her great decade.

dunno if this is as good as american doll posse but it's definitely a good album - musically about as interesting as anything she's done ever, only let down by the dodgy lyrics and silly narrative (though maybe that's b/c, being closer to it, i find reaching to celtic mythology far naffer than i would if she'd based it around native american mythology, which she's done in the past). the lack of immediate melody works when you realise that she's composing variations on classical works, and start listening with those ears. "shattering sea" is a terrific song.

LOL

This is terrible and gauche. All of the classical works she's directly quoting - very little variation going on here - have pretty immediate melodies and to make a Debussy prelude sound that cheesy and tuneless is a crime against humanity.

Maaaaaaybe "Battle of the Trees" could have worked had it...gone somewhere. That one has an interesting arrangement, with the prepared piano bits.

are you incapable of being remotely polite?

Are you pretending you aren't exactly this obnoxious when, idk, Radiohead comes up? I actually like Tori, btw. I genuinely think this is awful.

The only thing she does an actual (shockingly Philip Glass-ian) variation on is Bach's Prelude in C minor on the instrumental "Seven Sisters." Kinda cool, but also kind of classical lite.

lex/turangalila beef is one of the more curious quirks of ilx socialising.

can we limit people weighing in on this to those who already knew the sources? I like Tori a lot, what to speak of DG's legacy, but for a person who's recorded exactly zero Schubert pieces to suddenly be "yeah, I'm doing a variation on Schubert" is exactly what I would like to avoid in this lifetime

I think maybe the fact that even her most hackneyed picks are really close to my heart makes this more viscerally offensive to me. And I don't mean this in some weirdly purist way at all. It's just she's sedately & tunelessly singing Tori by the numbers on top of some truly wasted strong, passionate pieces. There's just very little subtlety to her approach, and even the few original bits sound tacked on & anemic. There's a lot of clunky copy/paste vocal editing going on, too, and the "baby voice" she keeps using nowadays is just too grating for me to handle at this point.

Mara Carlyle is a good example of someone who directly quotes classical composers *all the time* and, even when you're really familiar with the piece, you don't always really figure it out until you've read what it's based on or whatever.

In summary, this really just isn't as good as (musical luminary) Paris Hilton's debut album, you know?

There *are* some nice moments courtesy of John Philip Shenale, though, like the intro to "Fearlnessness" which is beautifully, beautifully orchestrated. It just goes to shit when Tori comes in.

Fearlessness*

Can't say I have an opinion about "th' pillaging" one way or another.
This is beautifully recorded, some of the interpretations are inventive, and baby Amos sounds like Bianca Casady.

i'm sure the feeling'll pass, but at this point i find myself resenting tori's presence on her own album. i want a baby amos album! i think the only reason "job's coffin" works is because it's sung by a kid -- the lyrics come off as precocious rather than tritely self-help. when tori shows up 3/4ths of the way through (with that clunky, weirdly on-the-nose verse about women "giving themselves away") it's like the actual nature of the song reveals itself and the earlier effect is spoiled.

at this point i find myself resenting tori's presence on her own album
Exactly. All the good bits are decidedly Shenale's. T's piano playing is good at moments, but mostly it's pretty simple and dances around his arrangements - which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But it's definitely more his work than hers that I think people have been pleasantly surprised by in an "oh my God, this doesn't sound like a douche commercial" way.

I never want to hear "Cactus Practice" again. I don't want to associate Chopin with... those words. Ugh.

IDK if I agree with the 'beautifully recorded' bit, Owen. The chamber parts? Sure.

But why is Tash's voice autotuned like that? Her natural voice probably sounds fine. Tori's home demos also probably sound fine. But see, I think that's a big part of what I find deeply problematic about Tori's recent output. Any redeeming qualities are completely lost in a sea of shit production/lyrical embarrassment squicks/obsession with overblown but ultimately hollow novelty records. She probably still does kick ass improvs in her house when no one's listening. Hell, she probably still writes great songs. But the way we get to hear it is filtered through some major, twisted Stepford Wives bullshit. (She's even mentioned on some of her interviews how her awful husband made her 'realize' how much of a 'cliché' her music was, which interestingly coincides with the time she started to, well, suck.) It's like she's been deliberately making it taboo for people to like her for a while now. It's like at some point, a glamazombiefied Shirley MacClaine version of Tori took over.

When was the last time you heard her actual breathing & pedalling on her records? It's the aural equivalent of her recent visuals: one-dimensional airbrushed kitsch where all the 'rough' edges are sloppily deleted out of existence. A shame, really, because her more spontaneous-seeming moments are what - imo - once made her so great and emotionally resonant to many of us. She would effortlessly channel ragtime ('Mr. Zebra') and then burst into Prokofiev-inflected beauty ('Yes, Anastasia'), allowing all the 'wrong notes' and 'mistakes' into her sound.

I'm rooting for her, I *want* her to be good again, but I'm also not going to delude myself into thinking this turgid bullshit is in any way on par with what made her good in the first place.

baby Amos sounds like Bianca Casady.

i was really surprised at how good she sounds - a far odder, more interesting presence than her mother (the slight feeling that this is tori being tash's piano teacher never quite leaves you throughout)