Tori Amos Albums (10)
'Abnormally Attracted to Sin'
Release Date 1/1/2009
Tracks 34
Label Unversal Republic
See Album Tracklist and Review
What The Critics Say
After the high conceptualism that lorded over 2005's The Beekeeper and 2007's American Doll Posse, singer and songwriter Tori Amos has decided to return to the relatively simple songs-as-songs approach on Abnormally Attracted to Sin. Those recordings, fine though they may have been, stretched the artist's reputation and the patience of her fans to the breaking point; based on her record sales, she whittled them down to simply the Tori cult (not a derogatory term, since many of her fans are proud to refer to themselves that way). The scope of this set in comparison with the previous two offerings seems more like a retrenchment than anything else. Not that there's anything at all wrong with that. There are songs on Abnormally Attracted to Sin that are as strong as anything she's written. Certainly the opener "Give," with its trip-hop rhythmic landscape and shifting backing vocals, slippery synth bass, and acoustic piano is beautifully constructed with a melody line that glides along a minor-key slant with a Middle Eastern tinge, and its lyric is both poignant and provocative. But then there is the single, "Welcome to England," whose 4/4 loop, drifting piano, and blend of guitars (electric and acoustic), strings, and ambient sounds is rudimentary Amos at best, and boring at worst. The refrain creates a bit of a hook, at least enough to catch the ear, but that's all. "Strong Black Vine," with its echoes of Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" in the intro, tosses Amos back into her Jerry Lee Lewis dilemma: she loves and hates religious faith, and is both ensnared by it and saved by it. It's a rocker as far as her songs go, and works beautifully. "Maybe California" is a simple, straightforward modern pop ballad. It's beautifully composed and delivered. The track listing goes on, and on, and on, and on. And if there is a problem with Abnormally Attracted to Sin, this is it: it's 73 minutes long. At the dawn of the CD era, it made sense on some level to be this "generous" with listeners. But for any artist to sustain the kind of consistency necessary to keep a listener's attention for this length of time is extraordinary. By the album's second half, one has to play and replay certain tracks because they seem to go by in a blur. And to be honest, this set would have fared better for some real pruning. Whereas cuts like "Fire to Your Plain," with its country overtones and in-the-gut melody fare quite well here, another country-ish experiment, "Not Dyin' Today," could have been deleted because it feels like a tossed off idea more than a fully realized one. The title track is an eerie abstract exercise in ambience and atmospherics and its fragmented (and provocative) lyric is the perfect strategy to anchor it without losing its dreaminess. "500 Miles" (not the Proclaimers song) has a beautiful lyric, but musically it feels lifeless and lazy. The faux cabaret of "That Guy" feels like it updates Brecht and Weill in the 21st century, just as the jazzy intimacy of "Mary Jane" does the Parisian Saravah jazz scene of the late 50s and early '60s. What it all boils down to is, well, boiling it down. Amos doesn't record as much as most artists, and it must be tempting to give fans everything she can, but in this case, it's hurt her a bit. Still there, are many tracks here worth adding to one's Amos shelf. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Nine albums in and Tori Amos is working harder than ever. American Doll Posse, with its great title, 23 tracks, and five archetypal personalities (all of whom resonate with feminine gods in the Greek and Roman pantheons) is an exercise in both excess and obsession. For starters, each of these personalities has her own blog. All of them have a distinct look. There's Pip with her streetwise standoff-ishness who sings about how her "Teenage Hustling" serves her in her adult life; she is also a very clever and intense "observer" (another important word for this record) of the political and surveillance situation in the U.S.; there's Clyde, a bit of a hippie who observes people and art from a perspective that is suspect of all male interpretations of the world (smart woman) and not the moment of encounter, but who that person is under the mask of it. Isabel is the glamorous photographer. If she exists anywhere but inside Amos, she is the fulfilled fantasy construct of both post-Freudian psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the father of Deconstruction theory Jacques Derrida. She watches the watcher watching. The surface reveals whatever is beneath it, and the layer underneath that. And then there's Santa -- not Claus necessarily -- but she looks closest for some perceived beauty (hers or her observational object's is the question) that is invisible to that person. She strips the moment away and gets right down to the task of discovering it: "Wait. Let's look closer.." Then of course, the voodoo priestess Amos herself appears in the center; she is politically pissed off and motivated ("Yo George," the first track on the set is a personal send-out to the leader of the free world in 2007 -- "I'm allergic to your policies") and a proud, aware, socially conscious mother and protector who cannot be fooled. "Big Wheel," the album's most rock & roll track, is an anthem that reveals her to be free of all bondage and a self-proclaimed "...M-I-L-F don't you forget..." This outrageously long song cycle reveals these characters as individual "voices." Amos credits each of the five in her liners and plays piano and Rhodes behind them. Musically, American Doll Posse is no less ambitious, and all the better for it. Though 23 cuts can become a Tower of Babel in song, Amos has written some of the tightest, most cohesive and diverse songs of her career here. There's Amos singing "Big Wheel"; there are the squalling heavy metal guitars in "Teenage Hustling"; the pumping 4/4 bassline throb of Clyde's "Bouncing off Clouds," with its intricate melody and shimmering piano work and layered backing vocals; the seductive blues-rock swagger in Santa's "You Can Bring Your Dog" that transfers itself into a quirky faux-ragtime melody before it breaks itself wide open and splits these two soundworlds in half. It's a number that's so sick with desire it reduces its object to meat. The brief "Devils and Gods," sung by Isabel is a ballad that peels back the veil to reveal an essential truth with harmonically shimmering acoustic guitars and lithe piano. Pip and Santa reply in "Body and Soul" with its enormous sonic attack where all the instruments are turned up to ten and pack a wallop with a fuzzed-up Jon Evans' dirty bassline and staccato piano that promises salvation through ecstasy, not sermons or violence. Some of the best songs here are near the end, in Clyde's gorgeous ballad "Roosterspur Bridge," where Amos' piano guides the singer and Mac Aladdin's guitars whisper behind until Matt Chamberlain's spare kit work gives the words an urgency despite the languid pace. "Almost Rosey" (Isabel) is one of the very best mid-tempo autobiographical rock songs Amos has ever written. Its sense of dynamic, slippery rhythms and change-ups keep a constant groove and the listener holding on for every word with the swirling piano and syncopated drum work: "I once tried to comply/with an authority that would/Subsidize my wild side/but at this altar was sacrificed..." Pip's "Velvet Revolution" is a Spanish flavored poetic piano and guitar ballad in a narrative fashion that reflects Cesar Vallejo and the manifestos of Isabel Allende and a young Vaclav Havel. "Dark Side of the Sun," sung by Isabel, is a an anti-war song with its wailing lead guitars and the singer letting the grainy side of her voice underscore the lyrics with conviction. Pip's apocalyptic "Smokey Joe" is an entire cinematic drama with atmospheric walls of electronic noise and washes of guitar that compete with the contrapuntal voices in call and response execution. The final track, "Dragon," sung by Santa, is knotty, complex and lilting in some places and aggressive in others; it feels like it belongs somewhere else, but that's where the beauty lies. It's the place where healing happens in the heart of the eternal feminine. And it rings solidly true. In sum, these dress-up characters are, no matter Amos' ambitions, simply reflections of her often contradictory nature as both a conceptual artist and songwriter. She is playing dress-up and not copping to it. It's not so much that she doesn't pull it off, but these characters and their strange views of the world, femininity, and the ruinous masculine come down to two things: observation and perception, and neither are always what they seem. These have always been part of Amos' expressed aesthetic. Perhaps speaking these through the kaleidoscope of different personas made it easier to assemble such a vast collection of songs for one album, to exorcise the obsession or simply to give life to it through excess. Whatever the reason, American Doll Posse is exhaustive and exhausting, and contains some of the finest material Amos has offered on record. As a songwriter her reach is higher, and when she grasps the gown's tail of her Muse, her grasp is tighter, and sure. Her musical vision and production skills are almost astonishing in places. American Doll Posse is a work that has its problems due to its sprawling nature. And yet, it's perhaps because of that sprawl that it makes a real case for the overblown and indulgent in rock & roll again.~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Released in conjunction with Tori Amos: Piece by Piece, a memoir presented as a think piece co-written with music journalist Ann Powers, Tori Amos' eighth studio album, The Beekeeper, is also loosely autobiographical, a song cycle that chronicles emotional journeys through metaphorical gardens all tended by the beekeeper protagonist of the title. Good thing that this concept was sketched out in the pre-release publicity, since The Beekeeper offers nothing close to a discernible concept in the album itself. At first, songs appear to spill forward in some sort of narrative, but the liner notes divide the 19 songs into six different groups -- "gardens," if you will -- that have nothing to do with how they're presented on the album, nor do they seem to have many sonic ties, and their lyrical connections are either tenuous or obtuse. Coming after 2002's Scarlet's Walk, whose title and songs clearly communicated its concept, this willful obtuseness might seem to hearken back to Tori's obstinately difficult albums of the mid-'90s, but The Beekeeper is miles away from the clanging darkness of Boys for Pele and From the Choirgirl Hotel. This is a bright, gleaming album that retains its sunny disposition even when the tempos grow slow and the melodies turn moody. Amos even occasionally punctuates her trademark elliptical piano ballads with organ-driven lite-funk -- a move that may alienate longtime fans, who may also balk at the album's highly polished sheen, but one that nevertheless fits well into the general feel of the record, lending it some genuine momentum. If the story line or concepts of the album aren't readily apparent, individual songs make their specific points well, and the record does flow with the grace and purpose of a song suite. As a cohesive work, The Beekeeper holds together better than nearly any of Tori's more ambitious albums, but there's a certain artsy distance that keeps this from being as emotionally immediate or as memorable as her first two records. But if Little Earthquakes was an album Amos could only have made in her twenties, The Beekeeper is a record perfectly suited for the singer/songwriter in her forties -- a little studied and deliberate, perhaps a shade too classy and consciously literary for its own good, but it's an ambitious, restless work that builds on her past work without resting on her laurels. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Perhaps Tori Amos didn't intentionally whittle her audience down to merely the rabidly devoted ever since Boys for Pele, but it sure seemed that way with the deliberately abstract arrangements, double albums, and cover records. That devoted cult may be all that pay attention to Scarlet's Walk, her first album for Epic, but it marks a return to the sound and feel of Under the Pink and is her best album since then. Much was made at the time of release about its concept -- conceived as a journey through modern womanhood, when Tori herself journeyed through each state in the union -- but following the narrative is secondary to the feel of the music, which is warm, melodic, and welcoming, never feeling labored as so much of her last four albums often did. This doesn't mean it's an altogether easy listen: an intensive listen reveals layers of pain and an uneasiness murmuring underneath the surface, but it's delivered reassuringly, in croons and lush arrangements that nevertheless are filled with quirks, making it both comforting and provocative. Which, of course, is what Tori Amos delivered in her early years. If this isn't as startling as Little Earthquakes or majestic as Under the Pink, so be it. It's confident, alluring, and accomplished, luring listeners in instead of daring them to follow. And, frankly, it's a relief that she finally delivered another record like that. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide
'Strange Little Girls'
Release Date 9/18/2001
Tracks 12
Label Atlantic
See Album Tracklist and Review
What The Critics Say
Something that goes unspoken in the cult of Tori Amos is that she knows the value of press and that she knows how to exploit it. So, six albums into her career, and several years since she captured headlines, she released Strange Little Girls, a collection of covers intended to strike a dagger into the heart of how males view females in pop songs. To be honest, you wouldn't know that from listening to the record, but you might have an idea by looking at the four separate collector-oriented covers, and reading the reviews, previews, and interviews Tori did prior to and at the time of release. The only track that really feels that way is Eminem's "97 Bonnie and Clyde," where Amos heightens the tension by close-mic'ing her vocals and reading with a hammy theatricalness that results in a cut about as chilling as the original, but without the context. After that, there really aren't many songs that sound like they're a female switch in perspective, apart from maybe the Stranglers' title track (which she does a nice job with), and it's very hard to tell what she's trying to say with these songs. Is she the fat blonde actress in the Velvet Underground's "New Age"? Mother Superior in the Beatles' "Happiness is a Warm Gun" (recorded with an anti-gun recitation from her father)? Is she the chair in Depeche Mode's "Enjoy the Silence"? How does Tom Waits' "Time" fit into the equation? Tori never tells us, either lyrically or through her musical arrangements -- witness the bizarre deconstruction of Neil Young's "Heart of Gold," another song that doesn't seem to fit her theme, so she dresses it up in flanged guitar and neo-trip-hop beats. Tori's sexual politics are so poorly constructed, appearing almost nonexistent, that the music by default rises to the forefront and it almost meets the demands. For the most part, this is a solid record -- overly produced and not as inventive as her takes on "Angie" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit," but rarely as wretched as "Heart of Gold." Though there's a bit too much surface sheen, it's a solid record, yet it's not particularly distinctive, so the pre-release hype about the gender deconstructions of Strange Little Girls makes sense, because the only way this distinguishes itself is through its stated intention -- and if the album doesn't make the intentions specific, it's best to get the word out any way possible. And while all that press may have given the impression that this is something new, something different -- precisely what it was meant to do -- it really is nothing more than another, pretty good Tori Amos record, only not quite as interesting because she didn't write the tunes. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Originally intended as a rarities collection to tide fans over until she completed the follow-up to From the Choirgirl Hotel, the double-disc To Venus and Back mutated into something entirely different as Tori Amos worked on it. She experienced a sudden creative burst, writing 11 new songs. In light of these new tunes, she decided to devote the first disc of the collection to the fresh material, with the second dedicated to live material recorded during 1998. As such, it provides an interesting contrast. With Choirgirl, she decided to add muscle to her music by working with a full band, which naturally transformed her fragile, intimate songwriting into something weightier, or at least heavier. That much is evident from the live album, Still Orbiting, which puts many old favorites in a new light. The first disc, titled Venus Orbiting, proves that Amos is better in a more intimate setting. Ironically, the album was recorded with her touring band, but the arrangements aren't as showy as the live reworkings, and her songwriting is a bit more straightforward. That's not to say that she has changed direction or ironed out all her quirks -- her lyrics remain almost impenetrably cryptic, her songs follow elastic, unpredictable structures -- but she has returned to her strengths: namely, concentrating on ethereal, dream-like song-poems. She's still expanding her music, but letting it breathe naturally, resulting in her best, most cohesive record since Under the Pink. It's a bit of a shame that it's married to the live album, since that gives the impression that both discs are for hardcore fans. That's not the case at all -- Venus Orbiting will likely win back fans that have strayed from the fold in the past few years. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide
'From the Choirgirl Hotel'
Release Date 5/5/1998
Tracks 12
Label Atlantic
See Album Tracklist and Review
What The Critics Say
Shortly before she began work on From the Choirgirl Hotel, Tori Amos suffered a miscarriage. While she was recording the album, she married her long-term boyfriend. As expected, both events cryptically wind their way into the album, which arguably has Amos' most personal lyrics since Little Earthquakes. The surprise is, From the Choirgirl Hotel is considerably more accessible than its immediate predecessor, Boys for Pele. Tori has opened up her sound by working live with a full band, bringing an immediacy to her sound that has never been heard before. Added to that are samples and drum loops, ballads supported by eerie, sweeping strings and heavy guitars -- everything she played with on Pele has come to fruition here. All the while, she's kept the perversely cryptic, convoluted lyrics that have always marked her work, yet the lines that connect have more power and savage wit than ever. Besides, Amos' songs have an interior logic of their own. Until now, it seemed that she could only deliver them on her own, supported by her piano, a guitar, or strings. With From the Choirgirl Hotel, she proves that with a little aural experimentation and muscle, she's as potent and powerful as any modern rock artist. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Highly ambitious, challenging, idiosyncratic, and confounding, Boys for Pele expands on the more experimental and progressive tendencies of Under the Pink. Amos frequently discards traditional song structures and employs wide-ranging, eclectic instrumentation in her music, while her lyrics seem to grow even more obscure, giving the album a very impressionistic feel. While there are certainly worthwhile moments, her experiments don't always work; some of the songs fail to stick, and it takes a few plays before many start to sink in. Ultimately, Boys for Pele is polarizing: Some Amos fans will only admire her more for taking the risks she does, while others may find to their disappointment that the intimacy and personal connection that helped Amos build her fan base are too difficult to detect. ~ Steve Huey, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
After sharing personal and emotional accounts on her stunning debut, Little Earthquakes, Tori Amos stirs those sensations up for an eclectic yet beautiful account of female security on Under the Pink. Being a woman, she's always in question of her actions, calling out and interrogating the opposite sex for her own pleasure. But it's not necessarily with a scolding tone. She's playful with her signature piano accompaniment, but allows for a twisted mess of guitars, violins, and bass loops, which are quite enigmatic like Kate Bush as well. "Baker Baker" and "Bells for Her" are aching with ballad-esque beauty, but the seething "The Waitress" sparks Amos' inner devil. She's quaint at first, but rages into a scalding vocal queen. It makes her even more a pioneer for female originality and independence. Singles such as "God" and "Cornflake Girl" are sultry and provocative, depicting that she's everything but shy. Under the Pink is typically melodic, but it contains a heavy desire. Amos is still breaking into something more definitive as both a woman and a singer/songwriter. The lyrical imagery is much more wide open, something that will become Amos' ever-changing swan song. ~ MacKenzie Wilson, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
With her haunting solo debut Little Earthquakes, Tori Amos carved the template for the female singer/songwriter movement of the '90s. Amos' delicate, prog rock piano work and confessional, poetically quirky lyrics invited close emotional connection, giving her a fanatical cult following and setting the stage for the Lilith Fair legions. But Little Earthquakes is no mere style-setter or feminine stereotype -- its intimacy is uncompromising, intense, and often far from comforting. Amos' musings on major personal issues -- religion, relationships, gender, childhood -- were just as likely to encompass rage, sarcasm, and defiant independence as pain or tenderness; sometimes, it all happened in the same song. The apex of that intimacy is the harrowing "Me and a Gun," where Amos strips away all the music, save for her own voice, and confronts the listener with the story of her own real-life rape; the free-associative lyrics come off as a heart-wrenching attempt to block out the ordeal. Little Earthquakes isn't always so stomach-churning, but it never seems less than deeply cathartic; it's the sound of a young woman (like the protagonist of "Silent All These Years") finally learning to use her own voice -- sort of the musical equivalent of Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia. That's why Amos draws strength from her relentless vulnerability, and that's why the constantly shifting emotions of the material never seem illogical -- Amos simply delights in the frankness of her own responses, whatever they might be. Though her subsequent albums were often very strong, Amos would never bare her soul quite so directly (or comprehensibly) as she did here, nor with such consistently focused results. Little Earthquakes is the most accessible work in Amos' catalog, and it's also the most influential and rewarding. ~ Steve Huey, All Music Guide
