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Tori Amos, American Doll Posse

by The Bridge
07/02/2007

Lemme just lay some ground rules for you, the presumed reader, so you'll know where you fit into the whole Tori thing.

There are those of you who hate her music and all of her fans with an irrational passion. You are basically the same thing as your typical freakish Toriphile, only you worship some really shitty death metal band instead. The irony of this is that Tori Amos could probably turn you onto some not shitty death metal (see her cover of Slayer's "Reigning Blood," which, as Tori covers go, wasn't particularly well done, but how many chicks do you know that know all the words to a Slayer song? Cerdit where it's due).

Group two are those of you who hate - or at least strongly dislike/have no particular use for - most to all of her music, but can calmly acknowledge that a sizeable portion of the music-loving population is into her, in particular your ex-girlfriend. If you are in this group - I dunno, you might dig this review, for one of two reasons: 1) I'm going to point out that the last album she released was a piece of shit, and the new one is not without its problems; and 2) I will attempt to shed some light on why your ex-girlfriend dug Tori Amos, perhaps enabling you to avoid dating similar girls in the future, which means you could feasibly avoid ever having to listen to some girl sing along lustily with "Professional Widow" (that's the one where she would belt out "Runnin' in the fam-uh- LEE" in an ear-splitting wail, repeatedly, until you broke up with her).

And then there are the last two groups: Toriphiles, who are obssessive fans that worship everything Tori Amos does. Toriphiles have been dying their hair red since '94, they always don black velvet and glittery fairy wings for Tori concerts, and they are as insufferable as any Superfan of any artist/sports team/politician tends to be. This is the group I am actually worried about. Despite the silly dig at metalheads, I seriously doubt any devout Tori-hater will know or care about some online review of one of her albums. Toriphiles, however, are prone to incessant googling of their girl's name, (lest a bootlegged live version of "Cool on Your Island" slips through their fingers) and will attack detractors of their beloved with the ferocity of a maternal grizzly bear defending her cubs. It is due to people like this that I am glad I write under a pen name.

Group four is the group in which I place myself: normal, non-rabid music fans who happen to think the woman has written some damn fine songs and is one hell of a performer. It is for my kindred fellows that I am writing this. Because, seriously, guys, what the fuck are we gonna do about Tori Amos?

For those of us who are sober, sane fans of the Redhead, she is a brilliant songwriter with a gift for baroque melodies and hallucinogenic lyrics, whose tendency to wander into irrefutably inscrutable territory ("Ratatouille, strychnine/Sometimes she's a friend of mine" - Wtf?) is forgiven by virtue of her knack for giving voice to feelings and experiences that are at once universal and exceedingly particular (a self-loathing crush on a popular boy who mocks your geekiness in grade school; hating your evil waitress coworker), and the fact that she can rock a Borsendorfer with as much sex and verve as any rock god ever rocked an axe. The sane Tori fan can admit missteps in the Amos discography: the overtly gooey moments that crop up on nearly every release ("China", "1000 Oceans", etc.) - although "China" was actually a pretty nifty Joni Mitchell ripoff. But the main thing that draws an army of fans to Tori Amos' shows is her glorification of outsider status. Tori Amos proves that being a geek - a masturbating, Sunday-school hating, heart-broken freak show of a geek - could not only be cool (punk rock and the Cure already took care of that) but sexy and self-actualized, too. And, I'm sorry, "Professional Widow" is actually a pretty good song.

But. But but but. There are problems with Tori Amos, and, lately, they are rather hard to ignore. Tori's mojo is being slowly eclipsed by her overly arty conceptual schtick, and the only argument I'm interested in having is when, exactly, this became a serious problem.

Some would point to Amos' foray into the world of techno, which is an understandable place to start, if only because techno has a tendency to slay artistic cred. David Bowie was dismissed as a has-been by certain camps after putting out Earthling, which wasn't even a bad album. Admitedly, Venus bore some questionable fruit, like "Datura," which found our girl chanting a laundry list of flower names in a husky bedroom voice: "Snow queen hibiscus/Frangipani" until I, personally, felt the need to go out and beat up a hippie. Any hippie. Plus all sorts of other lyrical preciousness - "lollipop gestapo" and the aforementioned sopfest "1000 Oceans." But it still felt like she meant that shit, and she wasn't playing dress-up in the liner notes that time around. Plus there were some knockout tunes like "Josephine" and "Juarez" to justify the rest of it. Right after that was her covers album, which I am not going to count since she didn't actually write anything on it. However, she did do a bunch of press for the album explaining the album art that was both worrisome and perhaps a warning of the conceptual hooey to come: each song, she claimed, was sung by a different character, and the pictures of herself in various wigs and costumes were those characters.

The next album, The Beekeeper, is, in my opinion, where the flash and artifice finally overshadowed the actual art: in its liner notes, Amos gallavants about some ridiculous made-up garden where she supposedly grew the songs, or something to that effect. I don't know, I was too peeved to really pay attention to the press on this one, because the songs sucked. A Sarah McLaughlan-flavored shit slurpee of forgetable melodies and some of the dullest piano playing I'd ever heard from the woman.

So my apprehension about the newest LP was considerable. As a Tori fan, you always find yourself having to defend the idea that Tori Amos is a serious artist, due to all the aforementioned art-school hoo-ha she insists on surrounded her projects with. And American Doll Posse is drenched in it. Our girl has split herself into not one, not two, but five different personas, each supposedly embodying a different aspect of the modern female psyche, and she's divvied up the album's twenty-three tracks (it's too long by half, at least) amongst them. So, you know, the sexy ones sings the sexy stuff, the austere one sings the political stuff, and the one dressed like a wood nymph sings the spacey, trademark Tori stuff.

Well, let me take that half-back. The entire album is trademark Tori, in a good way - a considerable return to form after the adult contemporary lite tone of The Beekeeper. There are some tunes here that exemplify all the reasons we loved the stool-humpin' redhead: "Teenage Hustlin'," for starters, which may not be her best angry-pussy stomp ever, but it's still a lot of fun. "You Can Bring Your Dog" finds the Cornflakey one enlisting her best glam goddess growl to invite some lucky fellow over for aldultery. And as for the trademark Tori songs - the ones where she tinkles the ivories and emotes with elliptical crypticism and Kate-Bush-esque vocals - well, she's sounding more like Kate Bush every minute, which is annoying. I used to stoutly defend Our Lady of Masturbation Metaphors whenever someone decried her as a Kate Bush knock-off, but it's really hard to keep doing that when "Bouncing Off Clouds" may as well be "Cloudbusting" (vocally, not melodically).

The album is too long, as I've already mentioned, which does the good tunes a disservice by burying their favorable impressions under an onslaught of missteps like "Dark Side of the Sun" (in which Tori's distortive pronounciation becomes unintentional self-parody), "Code Red" (which might have been a good song if she'd tried it ten years ago - here it sounds forced and insincere), and would-be knockouts like "Velvet Revolution," which has a charming gypsyesque lilt but is aborted before it can become anything more than a nice intro. Other good-to-pretty damn good efforts include "My Father's Son," an eerie life-in-wartime whispered ballad, and "Big Wheel," which I love simply because hearing Tori chant repeatedly about a "M.I.L.F., don't you forget" gets funnier every time.

This is the best thing about Tori Amos: she's an art geek with a sense of humor, and that's rare. But the worst thing - for now - is that she's gotten a bit bloated. There's too much look-at-me kooky artistry, and the material backing it up just isn't of the same caliber as the solid, track-for-track stunners of her earlier years. I don't know what tragedy "Roosterspur Bridge" alludes to, and my guess is neither will an awful lot of listeners. Tori's insistance on expanding the artistic dimensions of her products - all five of the American Doll Posse's girls have their own blogs, fer Pete's sake - has left her neglecting the stuff that used to give her the edge. She needs to start fucking her piano stool again.

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