Boys for Pele (Atlantic)
When I was 16, I genuinely believed Tori Amos understood me. I used to drive down the highway with all the windows open and blast "These Precious Things" and "Tear in Your Hand" and sing or cry or both, depending on my mood. It was brilliant, innovative music, and it provided the soundtrack to my pseudo-feminist, pseudo-intellectual, coffee-fueled adolescence. Once the second album came along, I was in college and slightly less in awe of her breathiness and her lyrics, for I had discovered Joni Mitchell and Sarah McLachlan, who both managed to touch my soul without a touch of pretension. But after seeing Tori in concert at the Palace, I once again appreciated her talent, even when she gratuitously made love to her piano, because she seemed so completely consumed by her music.
But with her new album, Boys for Pele, Tori Amos demonstrates that she has become a little too self-aware. This is Tori as an artiste, Tori as a politically-minded performance artist with a formulaic agenda, not as an intuitive singer/songwriter. Now I know that many would view these criticisms as applicable to her first two records, and I would have a hard time arguing. But I contend that Little Earthquakes and, to a certain extent, Under the Pink, also had another dimension - a heartfelt, emotional, sing-along dimension that Boys for Pele lacks.
Sure, she's still a musical genius, and her lyrics couldn't be mistaken for anyone else's, but the songs are just missing something. The 18 (yes, 18) tracks on Boys for Pele are heavily orchestrated and more varied in genre than her earlier work, incorporating a gospel choir, church bells, the Sinfonia of London, bagpipes, and a bull (yes, a bull). They all involve intricate weavings of multiple melody lines, provocative - if not compelling - lyrics, and her tormented signature soprano. So why shouldn't this album work?
It seems Ms. Amos has become more concerned with producing than performing. Her emotions on this album are synthetic; she doesn't seem possessed anymore, though a few tracks approach the standards of the old Tori. The first single, "Caught a Lite Sneeze," is catchy in the same way "God" was - "I need a loan from the girl zone," she croons - but its hook is due more to its tribal drumbeat than its melodic elements. (And I'm still having trouble accepting any song that spells "lite" that way.)
"Professional Widow" boasts the aforementioned bull. "In the Springtime of His Voodoo," despite its opaque title, is the most interesting track on the album, showing an even darker side of Tori: "You gotta owe something sometimes/You gotta owe," she intones.
All the songs I liked on on this record rely heavily upon drum machines. Just Tori and her piano aren't convincing anymore, and I think she knows it. Boys for Pele would better serve as background music at a coffee bar chain than as a mode of catharsis for a teenager in a speeding station wagon. I don't know if my opinion of Tori Amos has changed so drastically because I've grown up, or because the quality of her music has declined. Either way, when I think of Little Earthquakes, I think of a compassionate soulmate. When I listen to Boys for Pele, all I hear is a self-proclaimed star. - Rebecca DiLiberto
-- Rebecca DiLeberto
Copyright 1995, The Yale Herald, Inc. All rights reserved.
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