Tori Amos 2002-2012 ... are any of these albums any good??

haven't heard of those three albums that came after American Doll Posse

I think Scarlet's Walk is a really great album. It spent about 8 years growing on me.

The Beekeeper:
search "Toast", the title track, "Jamaica Inn" and maybe one or two others, but the album's pretty inessential.

American Doll Posse:
There's a great ordinary-length album buried in here. Search "Big Wheel", "Bouncing Off Clouds", "Teenage Hustling", "Secret Spell", "Body & Soul", "Father's Son", "Code Red", "The Beauty of Speed", and especially(and ironically) the two bonus tracks "Smokey Joe" and "Dragon" which would have sat nicely on the second half of From The Choirgirl Hotel. Definitely an "alternate tracklist" kind of album, as I find some of the other stuff like "Digital Ghost" and "Girl Disappearing" can drag down the good material.

I've not listened to anything since then.

I've heard surprisingly mixed reports about the holiday album though - as in, some people seem to think it's brilliant.

Night of Hunters is pretty good, imo, due at least partly to the presence of Tori's rather young daughter on vocals. She has a surprisingly mature and appealing voice. Midwinter Graces was her weirdo gloss on a Christmas album.

I know most people have more or less written her off at this point, but I think she's retained a good deal of value over the years.

wow, she will be turning 50 next year.

branflake girl

Is this all shit, or is there anything good buried in there?

no way to tell

you asked me this recently ilxor!

strange little girls - i like this! some really interesting ideas, the fact that it was a concept album AND a covers album kinda balanced out the potential negatives of each - i loved how she turned all the originals inside out, a lot of the time it was using the cover version as an aggressive tactic to challenge the original song. her eminem cover is one of the most incredible things, also love "rattlesnakes"

scarlet's walk - this was my first active disappointment when i heard it cuz it seemed so conservative and unexperimental, a regression from the path she'd seemed to be going down. but it really does sound very, very lovely at its best - stuff like the last minute of "virginia" is next-level prettiness. i love a good two-thirds of this album, only complaint is length! some good b-sides scattered around the various EPs and web-only shiz that accompanied it - "seaside", "mountain" etc

the beekeeper - dreadful, i prefer not to think about it. iirc there was one song i'd salvage but i haven't got the faintest idea which one it was

american doll posse - this is actually good! overlong and you can lop off a good quarter of it but less than you'd assume. some absolutely gorgeous, light, drifting songs - "bouncing off clouds", "beauty of speed" - and some really awesome dark, brooding ones - "code red", "smokey joe". "teenage hustling" is pretty fierce and "big wheel" as about as great a POP SONG as she's ever written. "i am a M-I-L-F, don't you forget" lol

abnormally attracted to sin - not as bad as the beekeeper but i can't really remember much about it and can't fully cosign an album with that title :/

the xmas album - yeah, no

― lex pretend, Monday, August 15, 2011 12:31 PM (7 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i pretty much agree entirely with the tracks tim cherrypicks from ADP.

night of hunters - this was okaaaay but not great; "shattering sea" was the one genuinely incredible song on it

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

No. None of these albums are good.

expecting about 5-7 total votes...... hmmm :/

scarlett's walk is one of her best albums.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Scarlets walk is really great. Loved hearing her play material from that on her last tour. That’s where I got off the train, though was given a play copy of beekeeper at work and thought it was okay. Night of the Hunter is great, Tori does a full fledged classical record. Jobs Coffin is a wonderful song. Playing is top notch throughout

I thought Native Invader featured some of her best songs in years ("Reindeer King", "Climb", "Breakaway", "Wildwood", "Mary's Eyes", "Bang") but was marred by bad production choices, cheap synths instead of a live band, dreadful guitar work, and IDK why the daughter has to be on every album now.

Reindeer king is absolutely incredible. One of her best songs in years. Show I saw was weirdly low key, but then Tori changes the set nightly and has played 50 plus covers on this tour. Ending with precious things felt like throwing a bone to the faithful

Live she used some pre recorded guitar loops for the new material which felt a bit weird. But then seeing Tori solo is pretty choice tbh

at some point Scarlet's Walk became my favorite of her albums, as it was immediately obvious today. knew the songs were good but it took a while to fall in love with the sound of it.

it's way too long but the good stuff on it is really really good. "taxi ride" is the best

It's probably her best conventional singer-songwriter style material, and maybe the only album where the lyrics mostly read well in isolation of the music.

(the obvious riposte to which is, well, do you really want conventional singer-songwriter material from TA? For the weird inscrutability of her mid-late-90s songwriting to be smoothed out?)

In approach the songwriting reminds me a lot of Joni circa "A Case Of You" and "The Last Time I Saw Richard" and "Lessons In Survival" - lots of dialogues or collisions between characters who each lack a monopoly on insight. "Taxi Ride" is a character study as devastating as "People's Parties" or "The Boho Dance" or "Shades of Scarlet Conquering" (albeit less ornate lyrically than those last two).

Kind of ironic that Tori began more clearly resembling her forebears (Joni here; Kate Bush on her most recent two albums) at the point where everyone grew tired of reductively dismissing her by reference to them.

Scarlet is probably her last album I enjoy in its entirety, despite it being overlong and a bit samey throughout, production-wise. There have been some good-to-great tracks on the later LPs, the problem is I mostly don't remember which ones exactly. I should probably revisit them all and put together some sort of playlist - it feels like homework, though.

I just checked on Spotify and American Doll Posse is 24 tracks clocking in at 1h24m, good god.

there is a decent album's worth of material on american doll posse (out of the double album that it is), even if it does tend towards pretty anonymous rock arrangements in places

i keep meaning to do a doll posse edit. some of her best songs buried in there

She started doing herself a disservice in this era, with the 70-minute-long CDs and (post-Scarlet's Walk) terrible photoshop art, burying some amazing songs at the end of records that were so long that even fans (see some posts above) can't remember what or where they were. I made shorter, resequenced versions of all of these when they were released. She also indulges in tics like ending most of the songs with vocal tags over sustained chords, and twisting the melodies to fit sometimes-prolix lyrics.
Her strongest songs in this era manage to build tension and power while downplaying some of the explicit dramatics of her 90s work. She introduces harmonic complexities as the songs move through verses, choruses, bridges and codas, so they wind up in a different place from where they started. A good example of this is the songs "Strange", "Wednesday" and "Mrs. Jesus" on Scarlet's Walk, which all share similar chord progressions in the verses which each grow in other directions as she adds sections.
I could choose a good dozen apiece from the first four of these, but here's my pick of the standouts:

Scarlet's Walk - "Strange", "Another Girl's Paradise"
The Beekeeper - "Martha's Foolish Ginger", "Marys of the Sea"
American Doll Posse - "Beauty of Speed", "Almost Rosey"
Abnormally Attracted to Sin - "Police Me", "Starling"
Midwinter Graces - she puts 20 times the amount of effort into her Xmas album than anyone else, but this is where she started to lose me
Night of Hunters - a lot of work required from artist and listener for thin payoff

what about the last couple? in both cases I really liked them at first listen but they didn't stick in my memory and I never return to them.

I'd also say that lot of these records - especially the last two - suffer also from some pretty questionable production choices. A lot of them come off as pretty lifeless sound-wise (especially compared to her 90s stuff) - dry, close mic'd vocals, stock synth sounds, guitar work bordering on parody, GarageBand drums, etc. American Doll Posse aims for this messy rock energy but it just falls flat and she never really achieves what she effortlessly did on "She's Your Cocaine" a decade before. Geraldines and Native Invader are the worst offenders here - I suppose it's a result of her recording them in her home studio with just her husband but I can't help but wonder how cool songs like "Bang" or "Wedding Day" could sound if they had been produced and recorded in a more interesting way and not just put together on the family PC.

My ADP edit would be:

Big Wheel
Bouncing Off Clouds
Teenage Hustling
Secret Spell
Body & Soul
Father’s Son
Code Red
The Beauty of Speed
Almost Rosey
Smokey Joe
Dragon

^^^ this album would stand up pretty well next to her early work I reckon. In fact it would basically be the closest thing she would have come to making a Little Earthquakes II.

There’s other tracks I quite like such as “Programmable Soda” but the above strikes me as the tightest possible formulation.

I find Scarlet's Walk too long and can't remember a few of the songs, but with "Strange", "Crazy", "Can't See New York", "A Sorta Fairytale", "Taxi Ride" and others, there's gotta be a killer 12-song album in there. Been slowly making my way through her catalog the past couple years and gonna try Native Invader next since it's *only* one hour, haha

Scarlet's Walk is definitely too long but it's a lot harder than with ADP to work out what should come out. I think I'd go with the following edited tracklist:

Amber Waves
A Sorta Fairytale
Strange
Carbon
Crazy
Sweet Sangria
Your Cloud
Pancake
I Can't See New York
Taxi Ride
Scarlet's Walk
Virginia
Gold Dust

I do feel like the above would lose a bit of the sense of sweep the album has, but it would certainly be tighter (and is still like an hour!).