33 rebellions per minute
"I'm not asking you to believe in me; boy I think you're confused"
1992
Tori Amos, LITTLE EARTHQUAKES
Tori’s songs do _not_ all sound alike. Okay? Not not not not not.
For those of you who actually own a Tori album (any Tori album), that must seem like a strangely unmotivated opening, something akin to “The influence of Cannibal Corpse on Ms. Amos’s music has been generally overstated”, or “LITTLE EARTHQUAKES is not a concept album designed to explain the Periodic Table Of The Elements to 14-year olds”. But of course, although I hope Tori’s established fans can find something of value in this essay, that’s not my audience. I have to face up to the preconceptions I keep hearing about Ms Amos’s work, even if I have to swallow my sarcasm when hearing the “all the songs are alike” complaint from someone just as fond of Metallica as I am. The other guy I heard the complaint from recently is a loyal Pixies fan, which is a better position to use this attack from, but still: every goddam song on DOOLITTLE is some vocals, some guitar, and a bit of other stuff. All alike? Hardly! Most, but not all, of the songs on LITTLE EARTHQUAKES (Tori’s simplest album, her “girl with piano” album) are some vocals, some piano, and a bit of other stuff. All alike? Hardly! I’d better get down to cases here. I mean, yes I assume I’m writing to open-minded people who are persuadable, but raising the dialogue above the “Tori Roolz!” “No, Tori Sux!” “Well, Labour Sux Worse!” “No way, Tony Blair Roolz!” “Yes, That’s Precisely the Serkumstants 2 which I’m lodging my Objekshun!” stage will be a good start.
Facts, approximately: “Crucify”, opening the album, features echoey synth percussion, blocky synth-keyboard chords, and Tori’s strained drawl on the verses, then opens into flowing arpeggiated piano and Tori’s purest singing. “Girl”’s angular piano strikes as me Gershwinesque, granting that for all I know this may be as useless and ignorant a term as Beatlesque, but the chorus makes shamelessly soaring Adult Contemporary use of a string section, there’s a heavier guitar-added bridge where Tori does some deep soul-mama singing and a guy does backup, and a firm half-note snare keeps pace throughout. “Silent All These Years” plays in the verses as a complex set of finger exercises, which combined with a nursery-rhyme vocal melody makes for a childlike feel but with an edge-of-tears vocal delivery; the crescendo and emotional climax is sung in a desperate near monotone. “Precious Things” starts with a loop like the breathing of an exhausted mechancal dog placing an obscene phone call, and (on piano) what I regard as one of the most effectively chilling instrumental hooks I’ve ever run across; the drums thump and the synthesizers squall nastily on the choruses, plucked strings enter, and there’s a frankly symphonic mid-to-late-song buildup; this also is the song where every Tori vocal line places emphasis around syllable number five, like it needs three or four syllables just to get her courage up. “Winter” opens with stately piano a la the first two Kate Bush LP’s, features some gentle strings (usually a cello _or_ violin but not both), and keeps returning to an ever-sparer cry of “He said, ‘When you gonna make up your mind? When you gonna love you as much as I do?’” that seems to be aiming straight for the adjective “gorgeous”, so I’ll apply it. “Happy Phantom”, on the other hand, is jaunty and syncopated, accents the choruses with brass, and uses its violin like a gypsy fiddle being toyed with in studio by Aphex Twin.
Side 2: “China” is like “Winter” with more production layers: soft synthesized drones, a bit of percussion, and two bars where the strings act out the song’s air of frustration. “Leather” is Gershwinesque again, and breaks into a piano solo that I remember felt pre-familiar and stolen the first time I heard it, but who knows on what basis; the violins are taut and percussive, the singing is playful. “Mother” is the one pure girl-with piano tune here; the melodies are understated, and the song’s propulsion, its dialogue effect, is almost entirely due to the amazingly precise variants in force Tori uses to hit each key. “Tear In Your Hand” is the structurally simplest song here, virtually AAAA, but instrumentally the piano is joined by bass guitar, drums, and a second kind of keyboard (clavichord maybe?), with dramatic instrumental dropouts and key changes serving to prevent stasis. “Me And A Gun”, following that, is a stunner: nothing but Tori’s voice, pauses for breath and all. Finally, “Little Earthquakes” is purest progressive rock. It moves from the guitar opening, to some auto-harmonized singing over four complementary drum-machine loops, to a chorus where girl-and-piano is aided by syn-drums going radically from one ear to the other, to a piano solo joined by distorted shred-guitar, to the low group-sung near-chant of “Give me life, give me pain, give me myself again” (joined by theremin), then returns to the verses but ends on the group-chant of “Hummmm. Hummmmm. Hummmmm.”
When I voted a top-ten greatest-records-ever ballot for the Loud-fan (fans of Loud Family) mailing list in Feb. ‘98, I voted LITTLE EARTHQUAKES #5. Still, until I prepared to write this review, I don’t think I’d listened to it in at least 18 months, seduced by the novelty and inventiveness of her later PELE and CHOIRGIRL. I’d started to wonder: is it _really_ her best album? After all, I’d wanted her to expand on the “Precious”/ “Earthquakes” side of her arranging, and she’d done so; maybe my fondness for this record was in part a quaint result of how few piano records are out there competing with it, how artificially radical it seemed? Two listens later, I apologize for doubting: even the first re-listen sent me out humming bits of this everywhere for the next couple of days. I love the abnormally fluent piano lines, I love the melodies or at least the cadences in which she delivers them, and I love that her ever amazing voice, given its first major public hearing, was stronger and less mannered than I’d recalled her as capable of.
The lyrics aren’t cryptic at all. “I don’t believe you left just cuz me and Charles Manson love the same ice cream” is certainly an _unusual_ line, and “Here I’m standing naked before you, don’t you want more than my sex?” has me wrinkling my brow and muttering “This is a trick question, isn’t it?”. But mostly, her declarations--- on sex, on dumb relationship choices, on hurting, on being raped, on leaving home but realizing “the bread crumbs are covered by the snow” and begging “somebody leave a light on” -- are sufficiently stark and moving and quotable that I’m left understanding why encoding her future thoughts seemed like a good idea. Luckily, one album like this gives me enough nutrients to last a long long time.
1996
Tori Amos, BOYS FOR PELE
If my opinions of each album I heard were set in stone from the first hearing, never to change, BOYS FOR PELE would be
my favorite album of all time. It has grown on me since, albeit less than a couple dozen other albums have. First, of course,
as pure sound, any Tori is hard to beat, coming from the fact that she's an essentially perfect piano player (in the sense that I can't imagine there being anything any human could play that she can't) with a mesmerizing voice. On PELE, that voice goes
from the hesitant, weak "Aaah.... ah" that starts the opening "Horses" to the conventionally excellent singing once that
6-minute song revs from sputter to first-gear, to the charismatic howls of "Starfucker! Just like my daddy!" on "Professional
Widow", to the low confessionals of "Caught A Light Sneeze" and the aptly sung word "beauty" in its chorus (which itself
don't match the amazing sirensong "oooh-ooh"s on "Father Lucifer"), to the playful show-tune strut of "Mr.Zebra", to
leading a gospel chorus on "Way Down", to the husky jazz croon on "Little Amsterdam", to the pausing-to-pass
on-important-news-while-running-for-her-life sound that opens "In The Springtime Of His Voodoo".
But hell, we knew she could play piano and sing, she did that on LITTLE EARTHQUAKES back on '92 where she also
wrote intriguing, appealing songs. PELE develops a certain cryptic streak, as in, I did not make any special effort to pick the lines "off with Superfly/ sniffing a Sharpie pen/ honey it's Bill and Ben/ off with Superfly/ counting your bees/ oh me honey
like/ one two three/ the camera is rolling, it's easy like one, two, three"; it's representative. Overall themes do appear, and
they make her seem like Jon Anderson (of Yes)'s evil twin: both put obvious care and effort into writing untranslatable songs
about spirituality, but where Jon finds his transcendence in reading, teaching, vegetarianism and general good-guy-ness, Tori
finds hers in sex and in chatting, neighbor-like, to a few millenia worth of deities--- God, Muhammed, Lucifer, Jupiter
("Hey, Jupiter, I thought we both could use a friend"), and Pele, for example (Pele was a Hawaiian volcano god, until the
New York Cosmos offered him $100,000/year in 1970's dollars to play soccer for them). Catch the lyric sheet capitalization:
"I know it's in God's hands, but I don't know who the Father is". Cultural icons are similarly grabbed for personal use, and
even the more clearly sexual lines leave room for interpretation. "I've shaved eveywhere you've been, boy"--- to my
knowledge she hasn't shaved her head, and if she hasn't, what does _that_ imply? And "he's my favorite hooker" coming
ambiguously after a line about catching Big Bird with fishing equipment makes it more, not less, disturbing. The most
directly appealing, because easily comprehensible, song is "Mohammed My Friend", opening by chiding the godhead "Its
time to admit: we both know it was a girl, back in Bethlehem". See Margaret Wander Bonanno's recent SF novel
Preternatural to see how that idea plays from a mind even weirder, but funnier, than Tori's own....
Musically, PELE is a major leap forward for ambition, at the expense, yes again, of easy comprehension--- the songs
do have structure, but they require listener co-operation to re-ravel. But "Little Amsterdam"'s cool jazz (with a hint of funk in
the guitar, plus screeching radiophonic transmission noise) is as accomplished as any of the girl-with-piano fare, as is "In The
Springtime Of His Voodoo"'s New Orleans vibe and the dissonant harpsichord of "Blood Roses". But most notably, I can't
understand how "Professional Widow", "Caught A Lite Sneeze", and "Talula", 3 singles by a major artist, have failed to
provoke a slew of imitators plugging their harpsichords into Marshall amps to play over pounding drum machines and
incidental noise. By god, it's powerful stuff; the notion that "Professional Widow" went #1 in England with a studio-hack's
"dance remix" is only slightly less comprehensible than releasing, say, "Stayin' Alive" or "Walk Like An Egyptian" or
"Safety Dance" or "All She Wants To Do Is Dance" in "dance mixes". Whatever works commercially, I guess. I suspect the
perpretators of that decision were underestimating the masses here. But I also am right now singing along to "Talula, Talula,
he's brand new now to ya, wrapped in your papoose, your little Fig Newton" and feeling that it makes sense, so I may not
be entirely trustworthy.
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