Tori Amos

also can't get over how great her VOICE sounds - neither the weird glassy tone of some of her recent stuff nor audibly struggling with everything except the lowest and highest notes. some of the self-harmonies on this are ridiculously pretty

 rather than a hermetically sealed inner circle with husband and his classic rock records.

she wrote a blog about her husband's 'stupid record collection' iirc
;)

even the video is good!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=285Lospdgb0

she also looks better these days than she did a few years ago; cut down on the botox or something.

I wish i loved this, but in truth I think I just like it a lot. Some bits are amazing, but if this is her prettiest, best sounding and least problematic album since Scarlet's Walk, I'd say it's also not as powerful as the great album lurking in American Doll Posse once you cut out the unnecessary bits (I have a pretty great proposed track list if people need it).

Some additional thoughts:

1. Her vocals are definitely approved. Not nearly as many jarring ai and ay sounds.

2. Kind of ironic that, now people have finally gotten over comparing her to Kate Bush, she finally records an album where she sounds like Kate Bush at some point in basically every song (albeit at times very different parts of KB's career - I'm most reminded of Never For Ever and A Sea of Honey).

3. I definitely want a whole album of Natashya. What a voice. Like someone boiled down the best bits of Mutya, Keisha and Siobhan into a single vocalist.

Her vocals are definitely improved, that is.

tim-approved vocals

I finally gave "gold dust" a listen and I really like it, as a compilation, it's more interesting than putting those songs together without the orchestration. obv some of these songs had orchestration before (anastasia for one) and were done better, but some of these are quite nice versions. super important or vital? absolutely not but it's more listenable than peter gabriel's orchestration re-recordings, to me (and I'm a huge gabriel fan)

"Flicker" sounds like a classic Little Earthquakes style track.

"girl"off of Little Earthquakes is so good.

i don't really know any of her other albums. back in high school a friend put little earthquakes on one side of a cassette, under the pink on the other, and i just rewound the little earthquakes side every time i reached the end.

The b-sides from the first two albums are key.

^ OTM. "Honey" is so good.

Yes. Also don't get me started on "Sister Janet" or "Here In My Head".

Take to the Sky still gives me a little chill 25 years later.

"Sugar" and "Black Swan" too. Tori must be one of the most rewarding b-sides artist out there, and as a plus for fans she would show reverence to these songs live.

the great album lurking in American Doll Posse once you cut out the unnecessary bits (I have a pretty great proposed track list if people need it).

tim i am curious about this! especially bc i agree there is a great album lurking in that record

"Honey", "Sister Janet" and "Here. In My Head" are probably the b-sides I'd single out first as well!

Also "Bachelorette", "Alamo", "Purple People", and "Siren" even if it wasn't an actual b-side...

my ADP edit would probably be

Big Wheel
Bouncing Off Clouds
Teenage Hustling
Body And Soul
Father's Son
Code Red
Beauty Of Speed
Smokey Joe
Dragon

I think I did have a tracklist but I'd have to reproduce it now.

Lex's choices are all excellent and would be on my list but I'd definitely add "Secret Spell". You could probably throw in "Roosterspur Bridge" and "Almost Rosey" as well.

There's often a lot not wrong with the rest, other than that it's slight (e.g. "Programmable Soda") or just lesser or doesn't hit what it's aiming for ("Digital Ghost", "Girl Disappearing", "Dark Side of the Sun") or adds to an existing sense of bloat (most of the interludes, which with some exceptions are unobjectionable or even quite good).

But the core of the album is effectively the great "return to relatively straightforward songwriting and performing" album that Unrepentant Geraldines is billed as being (not that there's anything wrong with the latter album, but arguably it's actually less direct, probably on par with Scarlet's Walk). The irony is that this is obscured by the heavy ~concept~ of ADP, which in truth seems more like Tori's post-facto attempt to retrofit a narrative where none exists, but nonetheless hangs more heavily over the album than her other attempts do (possible or even probable exception of Night of Hunters which I never got around to).

There's a live version of "Here. In My Head" that was on More Pink (second disc of b-sides that came with Under The Pink in Australia for a while) which was the first version of it I heard and which totally demolishes me, but if it's on youtube it's impossible to find under all the other live versions. Key is that she doesn't totally brock out at the end (the "here, hey, do you know what this is doing to me?" bit), instead it's like all of her rage is suppressed and poisons her bloodstream.

I kinda jumped off the Tori bandwagon after "The Beekeeper" but did hear "Gold Dust" and enjoyed "Night of Hunters". Aside from ADP, am I missing much?

i see this year's deluxe reissue of Pele is on Spotify.

"Aside from ADP, am I missing much?"

the new album is good. it's not exceptionally great (I don't think anything she's done after Scarlet's Walk is) but it's pretty good

a major frustration with the deluxe pele is they've restored the original "talula" and didn't even include the tornado mix on disc two

Hey what does a Brad think about "Sugar" and its jack antonoff from the womb production job?

I'd swap "Roosterspur Bridge" for "Code Red," but I'd co-sign lex's ADP edit down the line otherwise. That would make for a great album. I got a ton of angry emails from her diehards when I reviewed that album and said it was indicative of her need for an editor willing to challenge her. I remember liking "Abnormally Attracted to Sin" quite a bit when it came out, but damned if I could name a song from it now.

Going back to he original mix of "Talula"-- always one of my favorite singles of hers-- for the Pele reissue is inexplicable, since I'd argue that the Tornado Mix is probably the one that most people are familiar with. I prefer it to the original by a pretty huge margin.

Keep the original for the album proper by all means but at least but the Tornado Mix on the bonus disc.

Mind you there's some odd choices down the line. Including all the jokey b-sides from Caught A Lite Sneeze but not "Samurai"? Not including "A Case of You" or "If Six Was Nine" or the UTP bonus disc?

Hey what does a Brad think about "Sugar" and its jack antonoff from the womb production job?

one of my fav tori b-sides, it's so cloudy. it also seems to predict choirgirl six years ahead of time?

or really you could kinda put it on any of her records and it wouldn't sound out of place

oh wow "flicker" really is excellent

also, fav pele lyrics? right now mine is

he said 1 + 1 is 2
but Henry said that it was 3
so it was
here I am

also, of course, "got an angry snatch / girls you know what i mean"

"I'm trying not to move
It's just you ghost
Passing through"

Pele is my favourite album by miles (FTCGH second)

*sorry should say your ghost, copied that lyric absent mindedly from a website. :-/

this is just kinda baseless speculation but it's possible the lyric "this little masochist / is lifting up her dress" had a considerable effect on my sexuality

angry snatch for ever. Also Tori's Eagles lift on the opening couplet of that song really is very witty.

Not from Pele but I was thinking about this line from "Honey" yesterday: "And you know what you're doing / So don't even" - I can't even remember whether dropping the verb like that was common parlance back in c. 1994? It feels very much this decade.

She's a really difficult artist to vote for in the polls too, I mean "Black Dove" and "Marianne" both got zero votes - which is insane.

"Black Dove" feels a bit forced to me, like she wanted to write something with the immensity of scale and emotional heft of "Little Earthquakes" or "Upside Down" or "Pretty Good Year", but she doesn't really have a central narrative conceit or ~state~ to work with, so she blows up and over-invests in these component parts which individually are pretty great but ultimately add up to something like a "Past The Mission Pt. 2".

"Marianne", OTOH, is impeccable, perhaps the best example of Tori using her word salad lyricism to extract more impact from the narrative rather than less.

Wow I typed so far up my ass in this thread over the years my apologies to everyone

My favourite Pele lyric is "and last time I knew / she worked in an abbey in Iona / she said, "I / killed a man, T, I gotta stay / hidden in this abbey""

fgti! That's one of my favourite Tori lyrics :) nice one. "Twinkle" is my #1 song by her.

HI DERE

Hey what does a Brad think about "Sugar" and its jack antonoff from the womb production job?

― Tim F, Friday, November 25, 2016 4:29 PM (three days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm always surprised by how quiet the production of the original is, like she's singing along to a memory of a beat. The first version of "Sugar" I heard was the live solo piano version on the "Hey Jupiter" single and it surprised me that the original was so calm. (Best version is probably the full band live performance though - weirdly the Proper Rock Star vibe of that tour is such an anomaly in Tori's career but I think a lot of her songs peaked with these arrangements.)

I always forget how good "Black Dove" is because so much of its heft comes from the arrangement (esp the decision to delay the full band for half the song - and there's really no warning that it's coming, I still remember the huge surprise the first time I heard it) and also the middle eight. But I always thought of it as a sequel to "Girl" thematically.

I spent the last few days binging and - this will probably change again in future but - I mostly clicked hardest with anything that really spotlighted the interplay between Tori's voice and her piano playing.

I think that specific quality is one that doesn't get talked about much... Her piano playing is less remarkable considered in isolation than understood as this remarkable backdrop to her songs, the sense that these figure-eights she draws around the vocal melodies really accent the songs' emotional content, facial expressions you don't see but hear. It's really unusual for the pop song form, I think, the extent of chromatic density which is essentially there to closely complement the core melodic/narrative/thematic structure.

Take a song like "Doughnut Song": the way the piano rolls through the song like storm clouds, countervailing waves of light and darkness, the way she uses the lower register to really punctuate and emphasise the heavier moments ("and if I'm wasting all your time this time..." and then the left hand really digs in) and then the higher register to suggest wandering and tentativeness that leads off her questioning conclusions ("I guess I'm way beyond the pale....?") - this is one of several ways in which "Doughnut Song" is a sequel to "Honey", which has that same sense of storm clouds rolling in, and is similarly built around very delicate piano/guitar interplay.

Or on "Upside Down", the way the piano follows along with the middle-eight vocal ("I say 'the world is sick' / You say 'tell me what that makes us darlin'" etc.) but fills in all the bits in between the song's dialogues, like the notes are registering the impact, a bruise forming on the skin of the vocal lines.

Or on "Sister Janet", the way the central figure through the verses is played with increasing intensity, until she follows up "slipping the blade in easy" with "slipping the blade in the marmalade", and a sense of lightness suddenly enters with these higher notes, that leads directly into the chorus's reframing of the central riff as somehow optimistic and widescreen rather than claustrophobic and shadowed. And then she jumps up the register for the first half of the second verse to simultaneously suggest a ratcheting of intensity and an increased sense of vulnerability, a turning of the screw with ambiguous consequences.

And maybe the very specific thing about Boys for Pele which is so far out, and which maybe makes it her greatest album in the final analysis, is how it places this particular quality of her performances at the centre of almost every song. Whereas on From The Choirgirl Hotel, if she wants to do southern boogie skronk, she fucking gets the band in*, on "In The Springtime of his Voodoo" the centre is always always the piano (except when, bizarrely given the surrounding song, she switches over the harpsichord). The first minute and a half is in some ways one of the most astonishing things she ever did, the way she uses these exploratory, ruminative piano lines to trace out an idiom that is not even hers except by genetic extraction - and the pay-off when the crawling baseline and percussion come in is just massive.

* Not that this is a bad thing at all, and some days that aspect of FTCH (is part of what) makes it seem to me like her best album, but from a particular vantage point one could almost argue that simply blowing up your sonic palette is maybe the less radical gesture; the harder manoeuvre is to work out how to do anything with the one you've already got.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wVOpTTV5ds

Tori Amos will always be classic to me

wow i missed that booming tim post

and the pay-off when the crawling baseline and percussion come in is just massive.

you gotta owe! something sometimes!

Great post Tim

http://pitchfork.com/news/73081-tori-amos-announces-new-album-native-invader-announces-tour/?mbid=homepage-more-latest-and-video

http://pitchfork.com/news/pitchfork-announces-talk-with-tori-amos/

i would go if i was in NY :-/